Benjamin Thomas White The Emergence Of Minorities In The Middle East The Politics Of Community In French Mandate Syria

The Emergence of
Minorities in the
Middle East

The Politics of Community
in French Mandate Syria

Benjamin Thomas White

THE EMERGENCE OF
MINORITIES IN THE
MIDDLE EAST

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I Bayt Al Ara

huda@sidibousaidlanguagbf?c8m

THE EMERGENCE OF
MINORITIES IN THE
MIDDLE EAST

THE POLITICS OF
COMMUNITY IN
FRENCH MANDATE SYRIA

BENJAMIN THOMAS WHITE

Edinburgh University Press

This book is dedicated to my father, Brian White, wishing that he could have
seen it finished; and to my mother, Rita White, who will.

© Benjamin Thomas White, 2011

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Sabon by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and

printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 4187 1 (hardback)

The right of Benjamin Thomas White to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

An early version of chapters 1 and 2 of this book appeared as ‘The nation-state form and
the emergence of “minorities” in Syria’ in Studies in ethnicity and nationalism, vol. 7, no. 1
(2007), pp. 64-85. A short segment of chapter 4 first appeared as ‘Addressing the state: the
Syrian ‘ulama’ protest personal status law reform, 1939’, a ‘quick study’ in International
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 42, no. 1 (2010), pp. 10-12. Material from that
chapter also appeared in a different form in ‘Frontieres et pouvoir d’Etat. La frontiere turco-
syrienne dans les annees 1920 et 30’ (with Seda Altug), Vingtieme siecle. Revue d’histoire, no.
103 (2009/3), pp. 91-104. The author would like to thank the editors of these journals for
permission to reuse this material.

CONTENTS

Map 1. Syria c.1936 vi

Map 2. The Far Northeast of Syria in the 1930s vii

Outline Chronology of the French Mandate, 1919-39 viii

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

Part I

1. Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state 21

2. ‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate 43

Part II

3. Separatism and Autonomism 69

4. The Border and the Kurds 101

Part III

5. The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ 131

6. Personal Status Law Reform 162

Conclusion: Minorities, Majorities and the Writing of History 209

Select Bibliography 213

Index 233

TURKEY

Border of district with special
administrative status

Map 2 The far northeast of Syria in the 1930s.

OUTLINE CHRONOLOGY OF THE FRENCH
MANDATE, 1919-39

Year Events High

Commissioners
(date of
appointment)

Georges-Picot
(9 Apr. 1917)

Gouraud
(8 Oct. 1919)

1920 July: Battle of Maysalun; French occupation

of Damascus; flight of Faysal.

August-September: formation of Greater
Lebanon; state of Aleppo; territory of the
‘Alawis; state of Damascus.

To 1921: armed opposition to French rule
continues in Alaouites and region of Aleppo.

French authority spreads slowly across the
mandate territories over the course of the decade.

1922 March: autonomy of Jabal Druze.

June: ‘Syrian Federation’ links states of Aleppo
and Damascus; state of the ‘Alawis (an accidental
change of name - and status - for the territory).

July: Mandate over Syria and Lebanon granted
to France by League of Nations.

[ viii J

1917-19 Allied occupation of Arab provinces; end of
First World War; end of Ottoman rule in
Arab provinces; Faysali rule in Damascus.

Year

1923

1924

1925

1926-7

1928

1930

1931-2

1933

1934
1936

Outline Chronology

Events

Syrian Federation replaced by state of Syria
(unifying states of Aleppo and Damascus);
‘Alawi state autonomous.

July: ‘Druze Revolt’ begins; quickly spreads
across southern and central Syria and into
Lebanon.

October: bombardment of Damascus.

Armed insurgency continues to spring 1927;
put down by massive reinforcement of French
military presence, with much loss of life.

April: elections to Constituent Assembly in
Syria.

Summer: Constituent Assembly meets, draws up
constitution that does not acknowledge French
presence, is suspended by High Commissioner
for six months then sine die.

May: Ponsot permanently dissolves Assembly,
promulgates a constitution more acceptable to
French.

Parliamentary elections (December-January);
negotiations between High Commission and
Syrian government for Franco-Syrian treaty
begin under Ponsot, but unsuccessfully.

Negotiations continue under Martel.

November: draft treaty agreed by Syrian
government, text blocked in Parliament.
Parliament suspended.

November: Parliament suspended sine die.

Serious unrest in Damascus and other cities in
late winter/spring. France agrees to negotiate
treaty with Syrian nationalist delegation, which
leaves for Paris in March.

[ix

High

Commissioners

Weygand
(19 Apr. 1923)

Sarrail

(2 Jan. 1925)

Jouvenel
(10 Nov. 1925)

Ponsot
(3 Sep. 1926)

Martel

(16 Jul. 1933)

X]

Year

(1936

cont’d)

1937

1938

1939

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Events High

Commissioners

May: Popular Front government in France - a
real outcome to negotiations suddenly becomes
possible.

September: treaty signed. Return of delegation.

November: legislative elections.

December: Druze and ‘Alawi statelets placed
under authority of Damascus by decree of
High Commission; National Bloc government
of Jamil Mardam Bek takes office; Syrian
parliament ratifies Franco-Syrian treaty.

July: Franco-Turkish agreement on Sanjak of
Alexandretta.

November: Sanjak of Alexandretta becomes
independent from Syria as Republic of Hatay.

Still under French mandate, its administration
begins to adopt Turkish republican norms (law,
currency).

December: French government refuses to ratify Puaux
Franco-Syrian treaty. (27 Oct. 1938)

February: fall of Mardam Bek government,
triggered by controversy over personal status
law reform. Syrian politics at crisis point.

June: formal end of French mandate in Hatay,
which becomes a province of Turkish Republic.

July: Druze and ‘Alawi regions return to direct
French rule; so does the Jazira. Constitution
suspended, parliament dissolved.

September: outbreak of Second World War;
state of emergency declared in Syria.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The main funding for this project was a generous doctoral scholarship from
the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, supplemented by several
helpings of funding for research trips. The master’s degree that preceded it
was funded by the then Arts and Humanities Research Board; an MA scholar-
ship from the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies allowed me to live a
little that academic year. Small grants came from several Oxford sources: the
Faculty of Modern History, the Middle East Centre, and St Antony’s College.
I also benefited from Socrates/Erasmus funding for an academic exchange
with the Universite de Provence - Aix-Marseille 1. 1 would like to thank all of
these funding bodies for their support, and to acknowledge the help of their
administrative staff, especially Jackie Gray of the Carnegie Trust.

Several institutions hosted me over the course of my research. In the
Oxford Venn diagram I stood at the overlap of the Middle East Centre,
St Antony’s College, and the Faculty of Modern History. In Aix, I was attached
to the Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman
(IREMAM). On two extended trips to Syria I had the good fortune to be a
chercheur associe at the Institut fran^ais du Proche-Orient in Damascus (IFPO-
Damas), an invaluable institutional base. In the middle of my doctoral research
I was given the opportunity to take a year off and teach at the Department of
Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Edinburgh. The final
year or so of my doctorate was spent in Paris, where I once again found an
institutional home, this time the Institut d’histoire du temps present (IHTP).
This book found its publisher while I was back in Edinburgh as a postdoctoral
research fellow at the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World; it
was completed on another postdoctoral fellowship, in the Department of Near
Eastern Studies at Princeton. The academic and administrative staff of all these
institutions have my heartfelt gratitude.

xii J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

My research was carried out at the Centre d’archives diplomatiques,
Nantes; the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris; the library of IFPO-
Damas; Maktabat al-Asad (the Syrian national library), Damascus; Markaz
al-watha’iq al-tarikhiyya (the Flistorical Documents Centre), Damascus; the
Service Flistorique de l’Armee de Terre, Vincennes; and the Quai d’Orsay.
The personnel of the Centre d’archives diplomatiques, the Markaz al-
watha’iq al-tarikhiyya, and the IFPO library deserve particular thanks - the
latter two not just for their professional assistance but for their endless will-
ingness to clarify linguistic points (‘Su’dl lugbawT?’). I have been fortunate
to present my work at a number of seminars and conferences. These are too
many to list, but I am grateful for all the helpful suggestions and criticism I
have received.

Among my many debts I acknowledge with special gratitude the advice
and support of my supervisor, Eugene Rogan, and my examiners, Peter
Sluglett and John Darwin. In Britain, I must also thank Judith Brown,
John Chalcraft, Carole Flillenbrand, Elisabeth Kendall and Yasir Suleiman.
In France, Randi Deguilhem, Gerard Khoury, Andre Raymond, Nadine
Meouchy, Lenka Bokova and Pierre Fournie all offered valuable help. The
HTTP offered not just office space, but paid employment once my funding
had run out: my thanks go to all its staff, particularly Anne-Marie Pathe and
Flenry Rousso.

A number of people in Syria helped me directly, by discussing, informing,
or facilitating my research. Others helped indirectly: by giving me the benefit of
their expertise in Arabic, or listening kindly and patiently to my innumerable
stumbling attempts to explain my work in that language; or by informing my
understanding of Syria’s past by letting me take part in their present. Some of
these people are scholars, others are not. In ordinary circumstances, it would
have been a pleasure to acknowledge my debts to them individually. However,
at the time of writing (May 2011), the political situation in Syria is so uncer-
tain that an association with a foreign historian writing about a touchy subject
could carry risks, even when the book concerned stops at the beginning of the
Second World War. At risk of excessive caution, then, it seems best to thank
these people anonymously.

All of my family and friends (many of whom are, in the way of these things,
also academics) have contributed to this book in some way. A full list would
be very long, but special thanks go to Andrew Arsan, Timothy Bradford,
Andrea Brazzoduro, Jessica Carlisle, Anna Clarke, Yann Gayet, Maggy Hary,
Caroline Izambert, John Knight, James McDougall, Jessica Marglin, Karam
Nachar, Joe Nankivell, Andrew Newsham, Ana Santos, Marion Slitine,
Andromeda Tait, Annie Tindley, Saeko Yazaki and Ben Young. Without Peter
Whitby’s assistance with computers, this book would have been written by
hand. If there’s an innermost circle, of close friends who also bore the brunt
of discussing and re-reading virtually all of this book, then Seda Altug and

Acknowledgements [ xiii

Thomas Pierret are in it. I take full responsibility for whatever shortcomings
remain.

It is customary for the final acknowledgement to go to one’s life partner.
Malika Rahal isn’t mine, which makes the scale of her contribution over the
last few years all the more remarkable. (She did the maps, too.)

INTRODUCTION

Let me start with what this book is not. When I began my research, I planned
to study minorities in French mandate Syria. Everyone who had written about
the mandate seemed to agree that the French in Syria used the minorities - in
some eyes even created them - in order to offset the opposition of the national-
ist majority . 1 Studying these communities would therefore allow me to under-
stand better the confrontation between two ideologies that have shaped our
time: imperialism and nationalism.

My original plan was to consider several specific minorities, defined along
religious or linguistic lines (or both), to see how these different variables
affected their relationships with the majority, the nationalists and the imperial
power. This would provide insight into the aggressively divisive policies put in
place by the French in Syria, and the imperialist conception of the colonised
society as hopelessly divided that underpinned those policies. At the same time,
it would illuminate the means whereby Syrian Arab nationalism constructed
the Syrian Arab nation. While I was sceptical of the imperialist claim that
religious or linguistic cleavages in Syrian society were primordial, permanent,
and insurmountable, and that religious or linguistic identity determined politi-
cal identity, I was also aware that such cleavages are not negligible, especially
to the development of nationalism. A numerical majority of the inhabitants of
the new state were Sunni Muslims, but that majority was divided by language;
a numerical majority were Arabic-speakers, but that majority was divided by
religion. Sunni Muslim Arabic-speakers - sharing both language and religion -
were a numerical majority, but a much smaller one: nationalism would need to
appeal beyond this group to achieve a solid base in Syrian society. Since French
imperialism imposed divisions on that society precisely to hinder the appeal of
nationalism outside this group, examining Syrian Arab nationalist responses to
those divisions - whether seeking to reassure minorities of their place within

2 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

the nation, on the one hand, or threatening them, even denying their existence,
on the other - would help us understand how the ideology functioned. Such a
study would thus find its place in the comparative history of both imperialism
and nationalism. 2

I still think that such a study would be a good idea. This book, however,
is not quite it. It does answer some of my original questions about how differ-
ent variables affected the position of different minorities relative to the French
and to the nationalists; but my underlying research questions slowly shifted,
because quite early on in my archival research I noticed something unusual.
The secondary literature about French mandate Syria used the term ‘minority’
freely, and confidently attributed analytical force to it: certain groups behaved
in such a way because they were ‘minorities’. But in the archives of the French
mandate themselves, and in other contemporary texts on the mandate, it was
used fairly infrequently until around 1930 - when it quickly became very wide-
spread. This provoked two questions: when did people start thinking of them-
selves or others as ‘minorities’, and for that matter as ‘majorities’? And why?

I therefore put inverted commas around both terms, so to speak, and my
research project changed. Using French mandate Syria as a case study, I now
hoped to trace the emergence of these categories and understand the historical
context that made them meaningful - which, I have come to conclude, is the
context of the modern nation-state: states with a supposedly eternal ‘national’
territory over which state authority is uniformly applied, and deriving their
legitimacy from some version of the principle of representativity expressed in
the claim to share a cultural identity with a numerical majority of their popu-
lation. The book that I have actually written is not about minorities, as such:
it does not explain how minority X was instrumentalised by the French, or
how minority Y resisted the Fligh Commission’s blandishments and rallied to
Syrian Arab nationalism. Instead, it explains why, and when, certain groups
within Syria - a nation-state in formation - came to be described, by insid-
ers and outsiders, as ‘minorities’, and what that meant. By the same token, it
traces the emergence of the concept of ‘majority’ in the country. These two
paired concepts are frequently used by historians (and others) to describe the
societies we study, but they may be misleading: they deserve to be critically
analysed.

The book argues that it is anachronistic to understand the communitarian
politics of French mandate Syria in terms of minorities and a majority: doing so
implies the prior existence of a Syrian Arab nation-state with a coherent major-
ity. The definition of the Syrian state’s territory, its binding together as a coher-
ent unit 3 by common institutions, and its separation from surrounding areas by
the new borders that partitioned the recently vanished Ottoman Empire were
all developments of the mandate period, and gradual developments at that. As
Syria passed from being part of a non-national dynastic empire whose legiti-
macy still derived chiefly from the maintenance of a religious order, to being

Introduction

[ 3

a nation-state that was supposed to represent its population, a fundamental
redefinition of the state took place. Until these changes were at least partly
accepted by the population, the idea of a single group constituting (and con-
stituting itself as) a ‘majority’ with a right to dominate ‘Syria’ is questionable.

As we have seen, Sunni Muslim Arabic-speakers were a numerical majority
in Syria as a whole. But it is hard to argue from first principles the existence
of a Sunni Muslim Arabic-speaking majority in any meaningful political sense.
During the mandate period, that numerical majority might include a notable
in Aleppo, whose political loyalty was to the Ottoman caliphate; a preacher in
Dayr al-Zur, who wanted his town to be detached from Syria and incorporated
into an Iraqi nation-state; still another in Homs arguing for Islam as the basis
of state law in Syria not because Muslims outnumbered non-Muslims in the
state, but simply because Islam was the true religion and only legitimate source
of law; or a nomad in the Syrian desert, who regarded the settled population
as legitimate prey. We will meet some of them, not just at the outset of the
mandate period but well into the 1930s. The fact that they happened to speak
(dialects of) a common language and share certain tenets of religious faith did
not automatically make them fellow members of a coherent Syrian majority.
Only when the developing Syrian state came to enframe the political ambitions
of these different actors, and nationalist ideology constituted them as a single
group within the state, did some Syrians begin to harness their political ambi-
tions to the term ‘majority’. And when they did, their definitions of it differed,
and may have been contradictory, because the majority they usually identified
tended to be either Arab, including diverse religious groups, or Sunni, includ-
ing speakers of several languages. Even then, whether the ‘majority’ existed as
anything other than a politically useful fiction may be questioned.

It was the development of the nation-state form in the mandate period, I
argue, that made the concepts of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ meaningful in Syria.
But if the communitarian nature of French policy in Syria is widely recognised
in the literature, the modernity - and historical contingency - of the concept
of ‘minority’ are not. Works that clearly grasp and express this are rare. 4
One reason for this is that by the time the mandate ended, the concept was
well developed in Syria: even works written soon afterwards, by observers
who had experienced Syria under the mandate, adopted it to understand the
functioning of mandatory rule - not just in its final decade, when the term had
certainly achieved widespread currency, but from the start. 5 (For that matter,
primary sources from the later mandate period do the same thing.) Since the
concept retains its power in the societies from which modern historians and
social scientists come, Syrians included, they too have used it. But, as I will
argue, adopting these terms and attributing analytical force to them masks
the very important development that was the creation of a modern nation-
state in Syria. This is by no means unique to the Syrian case: as soon as it had
emerged, the concept was being projected back into the past in all sorts of

4 ]

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

cases. My argument concerns not only the French mandate in Syria, but also
the comparative study of minorities.

In the first instance, then, the aim of the book is to refine our understand-
ing of the politics of community in Syria under the mandate. But it will
become clear that attempting to understand why the concept of minority
came into widespread use has led me to concentrate on the form and prac-
tices of the modern state, and the responses they engendered among Syrian
society - without taking these forms and practices for granted, or making
prior assumptions about the responses they provoked. In this I join some of
the recent scholarship on the Levant in modern times . 6 Keith Watenpaugh’s
work on Aleppo examines the effect of modernity on the ‘architecture of com-
munity’ in the city during and before the mandate period; Ussama Makdisi’s
work on Ottoman Lebanon, too, looks at the effects of modern state-building
on communal identity. Both see modern communal identities as having been
in many senses produced, and certainly profoundly altered, by modern state
development - not as primordial ‘givens’ snarling this process . 7

Beyond its examination of the Syrian case, I hope that my specific focus on
the aspects of modern state development that give meaning to the concept of
‘minority’ will provide a robust and generalisable analytical framework for
comparative study . 8 This, I hope, will function on two levels and overcome
several kinds of exceptionalism. First, it allows existing studies that concen-
trate on particular minorities in the Middle East to be incorporated into a
single framework . 9 There are good reasons for concentrating on a specific com-
munity, but too narrow a focus may encourage one kind of exceptionalism: the
assumption that the minority under study is exceptional in the way they have
related to the state(s) in which they live. An extreme form of this is the ‘nation
denied’ model, in which the minority is taken to constitute a nation in the
exceptional situation of having been - unlike its oppressors - denied the state
that every nation should have by right. This is a model that accepts national-
ist ideology from the outset, and typically examines its subject in comparison
only with ‘nations’ that do have states . 10 Without wanting to deny the specifi-
city of different minorities, it is both possible and useful to draw a sustained
comparison between them.

Doing so illuminates similar processes of state development in the region,
and allows us to see not only that individual minorities are not exceptional
for having been deprived of a state, but also that minorities themselves are
not exceptional. Minorities are integral to the development of modern nation-
states, not awkward groups that do not properly fit into them. Meanwhile, by
examining the emergence of minorities and majorities as a dynamic, dialecti-
cal process, this framework avoids the primordialism which underpins bad
scholarship in this field and often creeps even into good. A glance at some
of the more tendentious works available shows that this is an effort worth
making . 11

Introduction

[5

The second level for comparative study is that of nation-state development
under different conditions and in different states, not only in the Middle East:
the framework I propose can be applied to the emergence of minorities (and
thus to the development of states) anywhere. A particularly useful comparison
would be between nation-state formation in the Levant, under mandate, and
the contemporary formation of nation-states in eastern and central Europe. To
take only one obvious example, the role of the debate about treaty guarantees
for minorities in the construction of both minorities and a majority, studied
here with reference to the Franco-Syrian treaty, could very well be compared
with the debate about the minorities treaties in European states. Here, too,
a kind of exceptionalism is avoided: the notion that the Middle East is an
exception in the number, treatment, or sensitivity of its minorities.

So the book is not, in the end, about the confrontation of French imperial-
ism and Syrian Arab nationalism. But in an indirect way it contributes to our
understanding of them. The development of the nation-state form in Syria
placed constraints on the French, but it also opened up opportunities for them.
It certainly affected the intersection of French imperial policy and the politics
of community in Syria. At the same time, the book proposes a way of studying
the development of nationalism from outside the ideology itself, but inside the
state-form that gives it meaning.

Major Sources

The most important archives for the study of the French mandate in Syria are
those of the High Commission. Since the High Commission belonged to the
Ministere des Affaires etrangeres, these are now held at the Centre d’archives
diplomatiques in Nantes. Inevitably, they are incomplete: apart from the ordi-
nary work of triage carried out by archivists at the time, substantial portions
of the Commission’s records - especially on political affairs in the 1930s -
were deliberately destroyed by the Vichy High Commissioner, Dentz, on the
approach of Free French and British forces in 1941; more were lost at the man-
date’s end during the inelegant French withdrawal. Some may yet be found. 12

Nonetheless, the surviving records amount to thousands of boxes: the
richest available source for the mandate ‘on the ground’, so to speak. This book
is concerned with the institutional restructuring of the Syrian state that took
place under the supervision of the High Commission, and how Syrian society
responded; the material contained in the archives on the relationship between
the mandatory authorities and the society they sought to rule over is therefore
extremely valuable. It gives a good picture of French official thinking on spe-
cific policies - why this administrative division was desirable, why that reform
was necessary - and specific problems - what to do about refugees, how to
deal with Turkish complaints about the border. From these a broader picture
emerges, both of the general framework of the mandate and its institutions

6 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

and of the set of attitudes that underlay French policy. In some senses the most
informative aspect of the records may be the gaps in them - by which I mean
not the lacunae resulting from loss or destruction, but the things that French
officials chose not to say, or did not even think of saying. To take one highly
pertinent example, documents on a startling diversity of subjects find it neces-
sary to emphasise the absence of unity in Syrian society, its ‘non-nationness’;
the language of minorities, when it developed, fitted neatly into this rhetoric.
But to my knowledge, no mandate functionary ever questioned the (eminently
questionable) unity or nationhood of French society. This dichotomy deserves
comment as one of the clearest signs of the category distinction French officials
made between colonising and colonisable societies - a distinction that histori-
ans should not reproduce. It also has implications for our understanding of the
imperial project as a unifying factor in French politics and society, at a time
when these were riven by deep divisions. 13

Syrians, meanwhile, left an impression on the French archives both indi-
rectly and directly. Most of the material generated by the mandate admin-
istration naturally related to the administration of the mandate: that is, the
government of Syrians. Government is never frictionless, however much
governments might wish that it were. We can therefore learn a lot about how
Syrians dealt with the mandatory authorities from the records the latter kept.
Syrians figured constantly in French considerations, especially (but not only)
when they objected to the way in which they were being governed. Much of the
material in the French archives, however, was generated by Syrians directly:
letters, petitions, newspaper articles. Crucially, then, the archives can tell us
how Syrians presented themselves politically, whether to the Fligh Commission
or to the League of Nations - how they understood their own society.

There are reservations, of course. The archives were constructed subjec-
tively, and may tell us more about who the French wanted to listen to than
about who was actually important: one might cite the extraordinary promi-
nence of the Christian patriarchs as the Fligh Commission’s favoured inter-
locutors among the Christian communities, or the near absence of sustained
correspondence with Muslim religious figures. Also, how people presented
themselves and their communities to the authorities was not necessarily how
they presented themselves to other Syrians. A nationalist politician might
address the Fligh Commission on behalf of a Syrian Arab nation, but to an
assembly at a Damascus mosque as a Muslim defending Islam: pitching oneself
correctly to an audience is neither unusual nor blameworthy. In particular, we
should be very careful, for example, when reading the account given of his
community by a Kurdish notable, an Orthodox patriarch, a Catholic deputy,
or a nationalist journalist not to assume that we are getting an image of it
that its members would recognise. Again, the most informative aspect of the
records may be the gaps in them. Still, such reservations must be brought to
any historical source; they are what permits meaningful analysis, and despite

Introduction

[ 7

their blank spots the High Commission archives provide plenty of material to
digest. 14

The other main French public archives for the Mandate are at La Courneuve
and Vincennes. While Nantes holds the High Commission’s archives, includ-
ing material received from the ministry in Paris, the new archival centre at
La Courneuve holds material generated by the ministry itself. However, the
collection here is also incomplete. Most importantly, almost all political docu-
mentation for the period 1932-40 was destroyed on the orders of the minis-
try’s secretary-general ahead of the German occupation of Paris; 15 this includes
all the ministry’s records of the 1936 negotiations for a Franco-Syrian treaty,
which would have been especially valuable to this book. In the end, since the
archives at Nantes contained so much - including duplicates of much of what
is held in Paris - for diplomatic material I concentrated on the archives there.

The archives of the Service Historique de l’Armee de Terre at Vincennes
are another matter. Again, there are gaps: in this case, not material that
was destroyed prior to an enemy advance, but rather material that was not
destroyed in time. Tens of thousands of boxes, including some from the
Armee du Levant in Syria, were seized by the Germans and taken to Berlin,
from where they were taken to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second
World War. Post-Cold War diplomatic agreements saw some, but not all, of
this material returned to France. 16 The division between military and political
affairs is not entirely clear for the French mandate: on the one hand, the Armee
du Levant was under the orders of the High Commission, which belonged to
the Ministere des Affaires etrangeres; on the other hand, many of the mandate’s
French functionaries (especially its intelligence officers), not to mention several
High Commissioners, were army officers on secondment. 17 In theory, at least,
documents relating to the political and diplomatic aspects of the military’s
role in Syria were archived by the High Commission; the military archives
received material, above all, on operational matters. 18 This proved very useful,
especially for understanding the slow spread of French authority into remoter
areas of the mandate territories, or the recruitment and functioning of troops
from ‘minority’ communities.

If the French archives for the mandate are characterised by large gaps,
the Syrian archives for the period are more gap than archive. The Historical
Documents Centre (Markaz al-wathd’iq al-tdrikhiyya) in Damascus has
remarkably complete records for the Ottoman period, and much less for the
post-Ottoman period. 19 The holdings for the mandate are patchy and unsys-
tematic. However, they represent a vital complement to the French archives,
since only here are any substantial records held for the Syrian administration
as opposed to the High Commission - and most of the business of govern-
ment was done by a Syrian bureaucracy, police force, gendarmerie and judi-
ciary, even if the hands of French advisers were heavily felt. Where records
survive, then, they provide important information about the bureaucratic and

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

institutional ‘shape’ of the Syrian state under French rule. From Damascene
police reports, provincial governors writing to the interior ministry, or offi-
cials on a tour of inspection in rural areas, we can gain a valuable picture of
the ways in which the state apparatus touched the lives of Syrians across the
country - despite the unsystematic nature of the collection, and even when the
reasons why such items were kept are not the reasons why they are interesting
today. For example, barely any of what must have been a mountain of daily
reports produced by the police stations in Damascus have survived. To judge
from markings in blue pencil on those that did, the reason why a few were
kept was because they were from days when (presumably nationalist) activists
had disrupted the foreign-owned tramway. But those few are enough to give
us useful information: they tell us where the city’s police stations were, and
that the General Police Directorate ( Mudiriyyat al-shurta al-camma) collated
information on the crimes and misdemeanours with which each station dealt;
they describe some of those incidents, from stabbings to public drunkenness,
brawls to rapes, or the murder of a baby girl; they give a vague idea of how the
police dealt with each one - for example, when someone had been injured they
usually noted how long their recovery was expected to take . 20

Frequently, then, such documents can shine a narrowly focused but intense
beam of light on a particular subject. For someone trying to write a narrative
history of some aspect of Syrian life under mandate, the scant and arbitrary
nature of these sources might be frustrating, like trying to perceive the design
of a vast mosaic from spots of torchlight falling here and there on random clus-
ters of tesserae. But for this book, which concentrates on general, structural
aspects of state development in Syria, the information in these sources may
prove more illuminating - as the same torch, shone around the room, might at
least tell you where the walls and ceiling are.

The most important of my published sources is the Syrian nationalist press
of the mandate period. I will begin with some reservations about the useful-
ness of this source for this project: these will help identify where it can indeed
be useful. First, at the risk of stating the obvious, newspapers are much better
at telling us what journalists and editors thought than what opinions were
widely held in society. I would nuance Souheil al-Malazi’s assessment that the
nationalist press ‘bore on its shoulders the mission of expressing the wishes of
the people, and their desire for freedom ’: 21 this was the vision that the press
had of itself. What readers really thought is harder to say; what the illiterate
majority thought, who heard the news read aloud, or by word of mouth, or not
at all, harder still. Flistorical work on the press in the Middle East has tended
to concentrate on production and to neglect reception: more attention has been
given to what journalists wrote than to those who read their articles, and how
they read them - which is, of course, much harder to study . 22 The press was
also heavily centred on the cities, and especially Damascus: of daily and weekly
titles appearing in Syria during the mandate, more than half were published

Introduction

[9

in Damascus, and more than half of the remainder in Aleppo. 23 The audience
that nationalist journalists claimed to be addressing was Syrian, but in reality
most of their readership was concentrated in Damascus and a few other cities,
where nationalist feeling was strongest and most articulate. Again, this is
not to dismiss nationalist claims automatically as untrue; but they should be
understood as claims, not verities. It is prudent to assume that rather than
expressing the wishes of the nation entire, nationalist newspapers reflected the
views of an urban, nationalist public.

It was initially frustrating to realise that nationalist newspapers were chiefly
useful as a source for the study of nationalist discourse, which was not my
subject. But, as my interest in state development grew, it became clearer that
the nationalist press could be a valuable source for understanding how an
ideology can be used to harness the state, how the modern state apparatus,
in turn, lends itself to the ideology of nationalism, and how the two together
transform the relationship between state, society, and territory in ways that are
directly relevant to the emergence of minorities. The enormous abundance of
documentation, combined (paradoxically) with patchy coverage, meant that a
systematic survey was neither feasible nor necessarily useful. Instead, I identi-
fied particular periods and subjects which were likely to offer an illumination
of nationalist attitudes on the minorities question: these included the great
revolt of the mid-1920s; the treaty negotiations of 1933-6; the Alexandretta
crisis, a little later; the arrival of refugees from Turkey in the 1920s and from
Iraq in the 1930s.

I read articles on these subjects taken from a number of different titles,
selected because all - by the standards of the time - had a relatively large
circulation and influence. 24 For the early mandate years I used material from
al-Muqtabas, the newspaper founded by Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali in the late
Ottoman period and edited during the mandate by his brother Ahmad. After
its closure in 1928 it was replaced by al-Qabas, whose editor, Najib al-Rayyis,
stayed close to the National Bloc until the end of the 1930s. 25 A harder line
of nationalism was represented by al-Ayyam, which at its founding in 1931
was also associated with the Bloc, but moved into the Shahbandarist nation-
alist opposition from 1935; 26 while a more inclusive understanding of the
Syrian nation emerged from Alif Ba’, the ‘semi-official daily newspaper of
Damascus’. 27 Since my understanding of the ‘minorities question’ changed so
radically in the course of my research, I have used less of this material in the
book than I expected - mostly as it related to the question of a Syrian national
territory. But I derived from it a much keener awareness of the ideology of
Syrian Arab nationalism, and of the functioning of nationalist ideology in
general, with all its inevitable contradictions and non dits.

French published sources, meanwhile, also became less relevant than I had
expected as my research questions shifted away from French imperialism and
more towards the nation-state form in Syria. Nonetheless, a range of books

io J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

and articles published by French writers during, and about, the mandate were
important for a wider understanding of French imperialist attitudes to Syrian
society, the place of the Syrian mandate in French conceptions of empire and
the place of empire in modern French politics and society. So, too, were the
debates about Syria in the French National Assembly, set down in the Journal
officiel - and the rarity of those debates. On some subjects, notably the ques-
tion of Franco-Syrian treaty negotiations and their role in the more systematic
application in Syria of the concept of ‘minority’, this material is clearly present
in the finished book: I consider at length the changing use of the concept in the
colonialist bulletin L’Asie frangaise, which I surveyed for the entire inter-war
period. But even material that in the end went unused nonetheless influenced
my thinking throughout.

French High Commissioners, 1920-39

Although this is not a diplomatic history of the mandate, I refer to the senior
French officials frequently enough to make a brief overview of the successive
High Commissioners worthwhile.

The first French High Commissioner to rule over Damascus as well as Beirut
was General Gouraud. He was the first of three military High Commissioners,
being replaced by generals Weygand (from April 1923 to November 1924) and
Sarrail (until November 1925). Sarrail, whose time in office was terminated
after the outbreak of the great revolt, was succeeded by a civilian, Henry de
Jouvenel. Jouvenel stayed an even shorter time in Beirut, returning to France
to pursue his political career in September 1926.

The first years of the mandate were thus marked by a rapid turnover of High
Commissioners: it was not until Jouvenel’s successor, Henri Ponsot, arrived in
Beirut that some administrative stability was reached at the High Commission.
Ponsot stayed in office for seven years, until July 1933; his replacement,
Damien de Martel, stayed in office for over five, retiring in October 1938. The
fact that he retired, rather than being recalled, marks a contrast to the political
turmoil of the High Commission in the 1920s. The final High Commissioner
to govern in the period of this study was Martel’s replacement, Gabriel Puaux,
who was in office when the Second World War began. 28 After the fall of France
a Vichy administration was put in place, but expelled by a joint British/Free
French invasion in 1941; thereafter, nominal authority rested with the ranking
French officer in Beirut, but a ‘fake’ independence was granted to Syria and
Lebanon in 1943, while actual authority rested with the all-too-real British
military occupation. It is because of this extreme political complexity that I
chose to focus - other things being equal - on the inter-war years.

It should be noted that the relative stability at the High Commission in
the ‘long’ decade of 1927-38 is in sharp contrast to the tumultuous comings
and goings of governments in the metropole, in perhaps the most divided and

Introduction

[ii

unstable period of modern French politics. 29 The point made by Andrew and
Kanya-Forster about the Third Republic before the First World War is worth
bearing in mind for the inter-war period also:

The ministries of the Third Republic, often precarious, usually preoccupied by
domestic affairs, rarely attempted to impose Cabinet control over foreign and colo-
nial policy. Major decisions could be taken by a single minister and approved by
Cabinet without serious discussion, or even implemented without Cabinet approval
at all. Ministerial instability sometimes left the permanent officials in control of
policy . . , 30

Administrative Divisions

French rule in Syria was marked throughout by a policy of territorial division:
what Syrians referred to as tamzTq or tajzi’a. In July 1920, Robert de Caix,
the colonial lobbyist turned mandate official, suggested dividing the mandate
territories - an area smaller than mainland Britain - into as many as eleven
statelets. 31 The next month, the most important and lasting division was made:
Greater Lebanon, a much-expanded version of the Ottoman autonomous
district of Mount Lebanon, was declared. The existence of Lebanon and Syria
as separate entities was enshrined by the mandate charter itself in 1922; all
the other divisions imposed on the mandate territories were within the newly
constituted ‘Syria’, and all but one proved to be temporary (see Map 1, p. vi,
which shows the most important divisions for this book).

The ‘Syria’ of the mandate charter had already been divided into several
constituent parts. The main body of the interior was made up of the states
of Damascus and Aleppo, while the coastal mountains between the Lebanese
border and Latakia, which had been under French occupation for longer
than Damascus, were also constituted as a separate statelet. I will refer to this
simply as the Alaouites, as French officials often did, and presumably for the
same reason: to avoid confusion over that statelet’s multiple changes of name:
Territoire des Alaouites; Etat des Alaouites; Gouvernement de Lattaquie, when
the French wanted to de-emphasise the statelet’s communitarian basis; Etat des
Alaouites again, when they wanted to re-emphasise it. 32 Using the French term
also avoids confusion between the statelet itself and the ‘Alawis who made up
most of its population.

To these three, another was added in 1922 when the Jabal Druze was
detached from the state of Damascus. The states of Damascus and Aleppo
were united from the beginning of 1925 as the state of Syria. The other two
statelets, however, remained administratively separate until the 1940s, with
the exception of the years of nationalist rule, 1936-9, when they were placed
under the authority of the Syrian government in Damascus. I discuss the

i 2 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

grounds on which these divisions were made, including the presence in the
coastal mountains and the Jabal Druze of what have been termed ‘compact
minorities’, in Chapters 2 and 3.

When looking at the map of these divisions, two important caveats should
be borne in mind. First, for most of its length, the neat line of Syria’s external
border existed only on maps in the early years of the mandate. For much of its
length, this remained true for decades. Secondly, the impression a map gives
of a stable geographical unit under the uniform authority of a state - never
a wholly accurate reflection of reality - is particularly misleading here: for
example, permanent French military posts and regular patrols in the north-
eastern regions of Syria began only in the later 1920s, in some zones even the
1930s. That these two points are related should be evident; Chapters 3 and 4
investigate them in depth.

Several subdivisions within the state of Syria should also be mentioned.
First, the uncultivated steppe of the Syrian desert was administered, to the
extent that it was administered at all, by the military Controle Bedouin. 33 The
Sanjak of Alexandretta, although part of the state of Aleppo and then Syria,
had autonomous status because it was home to a substantial Turkish-speaking
community; Turkish was an official language there, alongside French and
Arabic. In 1936, while the autonomous statelets of the Alaouites and the Jabal
Druze came under the authority of a Syrian government for the first time, the
Sanjak of Alexandretta’s gradual, permanent detachment from Syria began: the
combination of pressure from Turkey and the increasingly Turkish nationalist
outlook of the sanjak’s Turkish-speakers 34 led first to its becoming ‘independ-
ent’, then to its annexation by Turkey. Many of its Arab and virtually all of
its Armenian inhabitants fled in the process. Finally, by the mid-1930s the far
northeast of Syria - the Jazira - was both more firmly fixed under state author-
ity and considerably more populous as a result of immigration by Kurds and
Christians fleeing Turkey and Christians fleeing Iraq. This influx, with French
support, had also transformed the region’s economy. The Haute-Djezireh or
upper Jazira was therefore upgraded to a full governorate. The inhabitants of
the region were not, however, keen to be placed under the authority of the
Syrian government in Damascus in 1936; in 1939, when the Druze and ‘Alawi
statelets were ‘de-incorporated’ from Syria, the Jazira too was placed under
direct French control as an autonomous region.

Despite these divisions, the state apparatus put in place by the French was
in many ways unified: within Syria as a whole Damascus was the ‘senior’
city; if the various statelets each had their own flag, their inhabitants shared
a common, Syrian nationality, as well as a common currency and a common
external tariff. 35 As I argue throughout the book, both implicitly and explicitly,
if the French did their best to hinder the development of a ‘nation’ in Syria,
they were nonetheless obliged to construct a state: the tension between these
two aims ran through the mandate period. Politics in Syria under the mandate

Introduction

[ 13

was largely a contest over control of that state apparatus. Syrian Arab nation-
alists wanted to control the entire state apparatus, and in the period 1936-9
they were permitted to - up to a point. Syrians who favoured cooperation with
the French, and opposed the nationalists, were also usually concerned with
controlling the state apparatus, or at least the part of it that touched them. As
a mandate state, Syria was meant to be an expression of its inhabitants’ right
to self-determination - a nation-state, even if the identity of the Syrian nation
remained to be defined.

A word about the ‘ordinary’ administrative subdivisions within Syria: the
state was divided into governorates ( mubafadba ) and sanjaks, which were
further divided by caza (qadba’) and district (ndhiya). The senior local official
at each level was the governor (mubafidh) for governorates and sanjaks, the
qa’immaqam for cazas and the mud.Tr for districts. Future instances of these
words will be written without italics or diacritics.

Structure

The book is divided into three parts. In Part I (Chapters 1 and 2), I make a
general argument then apply it to French mandate Syria; in Parts II (Chapters
3 and 4) and III (Chapters 5 and 6), I offer specific case studies illustrating the
argument. Since the structure of this book is thematic, not narrative, an outline
chronology is included for quick reference (see p. viii).

Chapter 1 explains the circumstances in which the concept of minority
emerged in international public discourse, as the nation-state became the
standard state form after the First World War. Having identified the historical
origins of the concept, it shows how its usage has escaped those origins - to
the detriment of its analytical usefulness. It explains why minority is a distinc-
tively modern concept, and outlines various aspects of modern nation-state
development which give it meaning.

Chapter 2 reconsiders the concept’s place in the history and historiography
of the French mandate in Syria. While French policy in Syria was certainly divi-
sive, simply describing it as ‘divide-and-rule’ and assuming that the divisions
involved were those between a majority and minorities is not satisfactory.
The mandatory authorities certainly saw many divisions in Syrian society and
sought to exploit and exacerbate them, but the category of ‘minority’ was not
systematically attached to those divisions - not at first, at least, and in some
cases hardly at all. By outlining how certain groups came to be identified as
‘minorities’ (or not), the chapter offers an insight into French imperialist atti-
tudes towards Syrian society and the groups within it, and the policies that
those attitudes informed. It also broaches the question of why the category
came into use, contrasting it to the older Ottoman category of millet or reli-
gious community, 36 and links my general argument in Chapter 1 to its specific
application in Syria.

i4 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Part I thus establishes my general analytical framework (Chapter 1 ) and the
parameters of my specific empirical enquiry (Chapter 2). The rest of the book
presents four thematic chapters, each offering a case study of one aspect of
state development in French mandate Syria to illustrate how that development
led to the emergence of ‘minorities’. They form two pairs. Part II considers the
development of a coherent national territory in Syria, taking a critical look at
the question of separatism (Chapter 3) and the definition of the state’s borders
(Chapter 4). Part III addresses the transformation of the post-Ottoman state’s
legal institutions. First, it considers the development of a new body of inter-
national law regarding minorities, and the debate over its application to Syria
(Chapter 5). Then, it examines France’s multiple failed attempts to reform
personal status law in Syria (Chapter 6), showing how legal change - even
abortive legal change - encouraged some actors to see themselves as ‘minori-
ties’, and others to present themselves for the first time as representatives of a
‘majority’.

Notes

1. Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism,
1920-1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1987), p. 58; Michael Provence, The Great
Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 2005), p. 50. The same interpretation can be found in textbooks: Robert
Aldrich, Greater France. A Flistory of French Overseas Expansion (London:
Palgrave, 1996), pp. 208-12; William L. Cleveland, A Flistory of the Modern
Middle East, 3rd edn (Oxford: Westview Press, 2004), pp. 218-23. See also
Chapter 2.

2. My main, well-founded worry was that the focus on minorities might lead some to
assume a prejudged hostility on my part towards Syrian nationalism in particular.
Nationalist claims deserve to be examined with the same sceptical inquisitiveness
wherever they are made.

3. Despite the administrative divisions imposed by the French, see below.

4. Among them are Elie Kedourie, ‘Ethnicity, majority, and minority in the Middle
East’, on the concept in general, and Nelida Fuccaro, ‘Minorities and ethnic
mobilisation: the Kurds in northern Iraq and Syria’, on a specific minority.

5. Albert H. Hourani, Syria and Eebanon: A Political Essay (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1946), and on the Arab world more generally Minorities in the
Arab World (London: Oxford University Press, 1947); Stephen H. Longrigg, Syria
and Lebanon under French Mandate (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).

6. Deserving mention here is the research programme on the mandates at the Institut
fran^ais d’etudes arabes de Damas in the late 1990s and early 2000s which resulted
in the publication of two substantial collective works edited by Nadine Meouchy
and Peter Sluglett (see Bibliography).

7. Keith D. Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East. Revolution, Nationalism,

Introduction

[i5

Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006); Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History,
and Violence in Nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon (London: University of
California Press, 2000), and ‘Ottoman orientalism’, The American Historical
Review (2002), 107(3) (accessed online), on Ottoman modernity more generally.

8. This was refined by my discussions with participants at a ‘thematic conversation’ I
organised at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual conferences in 2006 and
2007, and a panel I ran at the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies annual
conference in 2005, both under the title ‘Majorities and minorities in the Middle
East and North Africa’.

9. Such studies are numerous. Examples that are particularly relevant to the Syrian
case include David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 3rd rev. edn
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2004); or Khaldun S. Husry, ‘The Assyrian Affair of 1933’
(I and II), International Journal of Middle East Studies (1974), 5(2): 161-76, and
5(3): 344-60, and Sami Zubaida, ‘Contested nations: Iraq and the Assyrians’,
Nations and nationalism (2000), 6(3): 363-82.

10. The term comes from the title of David McDowall, The Kurds: A Nation Denied
(London: Minority Rights Group, 1992), though his A Modern History of the
Kurds is somewhat more careful in its assumptions.

11. Such as Mordechai Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East : A History of Struggle
and Self-expression (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991).

12. Pierre Fournie and Franqois-Xavier Tregan, ‘Outils documentaires sur le mandat
framjais’, in Meouchy and Sluglett (eds), The British and French Mandates,
pp. 45-53.

13. As Rod Kedward puts it, ‘Colonialism was universally projected in France as an
epic adventure in the realization and growth of French identity . . . The level of
tacit agreement on colonial matters in the period 1900-1914, and well beyond,
was itself a rare facet of French political life.’ La vie en bleu: France and the French
since 1900, paperback edn (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 15.

14. From the point of view of this book, perhaps the most frustratingly absent records
are those of the High Commissioner’s representatives - delegates, assistant del-
egates, or governors - in Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia and Suwayda’. We have
some of what they sent to Beirut, but nothing that they produced for internal
consumption, or preferred not to forward.

15. This was Alexis Leger, better known today as the poet Saint-John Perse.

16. Martin C. Thomas, ‘French intelligence-gathering in the Syrian mandate, 1920-
40’, Middle Eastern Studies (2002), 38(1): 1-32, quote at 2. (The fact that the
partial return amounted to 40,000 boxes shows the size of the original haul.)

17. A prosopography of the Service des renseignements du Levant is contained in
Jean-David Mizrahi, Genese de I’Etat mandataire. Services des Renseignements en
Syrie et au Liban dans les annees 1920 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003),
pp. 183-288.

18. See introduction to the inventory of Archives du Levant, sub-series 4 H (1917-46).

1 6 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

19. At the time of my research in Damascus the Centre’s staff had recently prepared an
archival law, the country’s first, for the Syrian administration. Whether it would
be passed, or, having been passed, applied, was not certain.

20. A number of such reports can be found in MWT, watha’iq al-daivla, sijill 2, under
wizarat al-dakbiliyya - al-amn al-‘amm - taqanr. The murder of a baby girl, whose
body was found in a garden off Baghdad Street, is recorded on 5 September 1936
in a report under call number 6.

21. Souheil al-Malazi, al-Tabd c a wal-sihdfa f Halab (Damascus: Dar Ya'rub lil-dirasat,
1996), p. 198 - nonetheless a valuable work, particularly on technical questions
and on the role of the Armenian community in the Aleppo press.

22. Ami Ayalon’s work is a very honourable exception.

23. Shams al-Dln al-Rifa‘I, Tarikh al-sihdfa al-suriyya, al-juz’ al-tham: al-intiddb
al-faransl battd al-istiqldl, 1918-1947 (Cairo: Dar al-Ma'arif, 1969), pp. 161-4.

24. Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), ch. 6. Nasir Denaria’s help in locating these articles,
among stacks of bound volumes and kilometres of microfilm, was invaluable.

25. Najib al-Rayyis, Yd dhaldm al-sijn (1920-1952). Al-a c mdl al-mukhtdra 1 (London:
Riad el-Rayyes, 1994), p. 27 (introduction by Juzlf Ilyas).

26. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 269, 573. The newspaper introduces
itself in its first issue: al-Ayyam, 10 May 1931.

27. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 136. After discussing a fiery article from
al-Ayydm with me, one of my (Christian) teachers in Damascus said he understood
why his father preferred Alif Ba’.

28. A complete list of French High Commissioners and their dates in office can be
found in the introduction to SHAT, Inventaire des archives dn Levant. Sous-serie
4 H (1917-1946), the source for dates in this paragraph. These reflect the official
period in office; in practice, High Commissioners usually arrived in Beirut some
time after their appointment - Puaux was appointed in October 1938 but did not
reach Lebanon until early January 1939.

29. ‘Fifteen cabinets under the presidency of Gaston Doumergue, 1924-1931; three
in the eleven months of Paul Doumer’s presidency before his murder in 1932; sev-
enteen under Albert Lebrun, between 1932 and 1940 - though only eleven prime
ministers and ten ministers of foreign affairs led the musical chairs.’ Eugen Weber,
The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) p. 111.

30. C. M. Andrew and A. K. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The French “colonial party”: its com-
position, aims and influence, 1885-1914’, The Historical Journal (1971) 14(1):
99-128 at 127.

31. Turkish- and Kurdish-speaking zones, a Lebanese statelet, and ‘eight or nine
autonomies’ in the remainder. Gerard D. Khoury, Une tutelle coloniale: le mandat
frangais en Syrie et au Liban. Ecrits politiques de Robert de Caix (Paris: Editions
Belin, 2006), pp. 248-70, quote at 261.

32. On one occasion its name changed by accident: the High Commissioner’s decree
of 28 June 1922 linking the statelets of Syria as a federation mentioned an Etat des

Introduction

[ i7

Alaouites that did not exist - the entity concerned was the Territoire des Alaouites.
The High Commission noticed its mistake the next month and issued another
decree retrospectively upgrading the territory to a state as of 28 June (Takla 2004:
80).

33. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 58-9; Thomas, ‘French
intelligence-gathering’ .

34. This should not be taken for granted. In the 1920s the sanjak was a refuge for
Turks loyal to the vanished Ottoman Empire and opposed to Mustafa Kemal’s
nationalist republic. In other parts of northern Syria, notably the city of Aleppo,
substantial turcophone communities became increasingly Arabised during the
mandate as Syrians.

35. In the words of Roger Owen and §evket Pamuk, ‘from an economic point of
view . . . the whole area [of ‘Syria’] was governed more or less as a single unit’. A
History of the Middle East Economies in the Tiventieth Century (London: I. B.
Tauris, 1998), p. 64.

36. The term can refer to Muslims, but by the nineteenth century this was not the
normal usage. Later instances of this word will not be italicised. It is pronounced
mil-LET.

PART I

CHAPTER

1

MINORITIES, MAJORITIES AND THE
NATION 'STATE

Introduction

The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1910-11,
does not contain an entry for ‘minorities’. By the fourteenth edition of 1929
the entry on minorities runs to eleven pages, mostly discussing the post-First
World War peace settlements and the League of Nations.

Minorities seem to have come out of nowhere; or rather, the term ‘minor-
ity’ does. As late as 1914 it hardly existed in its modern sense of a group ‘dis-
tinguished by common ties of descent, physical appearance, language, culture
or religion, in virtue of which they feel or are regarded as different from the
majority of the population in a society’ 1 - a distinction usually understood
to have political significance. But in the immediate post-war period the term
suddenly emerged as a key concept in the mainstream of international public
discourse, and by the end of the twentieth century it was applied to a bewilder-
ing range of groups in widely differing situations around the world. Moreover,
once in circulation, the term was freely applied to past societies: Jews in medie-
val Europe, for example, or non-Muslims in the Islamic empires. The resulting
theoretical confusion has been great. The term is frequently - indeed, almost
always - used as if it were a neutral, objective category; as if certain groups
within any given society are self-evidently ‘minorities’. This is not the case. Still
more unsafe is the assumption, implicit in the use of the term ‘minorities’, that
‘majorities’ exist as unproblematic entities.

‘Minority’: Origins of a Slippery Concept

The use of the word ‘minority’ in the modern sense - meaning a cultur-
ally defined group within a polity whose members face legal, political,

22 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

or social disadvantages because of their cultural belonging - is relatively
recent. It first appeared in the mid-1800s, and referred most often to reli-
gious groups. At that time, though, this sense seems not yet to have been
clearly distinguished from the more narrowly political meaning of a group
holding distinct political views that are not shared by a majority of political
actors - this, in any case, is the impression given by the nineteenth-century
uses of the word cited in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ). 2 It was an
important concept in democratic political theory, but while there is some
theoretical overlap, it is not congruent with the sense of a minority group
within society at large.

The broader meaning became suddenly more distinct, and widespread, in
the years around the First World War - as the example of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica shows. The OED’s first citations for the locutions national and
ethnic minorities were in 1918 and 1945, respectively; in French, Ee Robert
cites the equivalent terms in 1908 and 1931. At the root of this change is the
assumption that groups defined by some aspect of their culture will perma-
nently form a political minority because their cultural identity defines their
attitudes across a wide range of political issues, especially regarding their
relationship with the state. 3

That assumption belongs to the age of nationalism and modern states - as
was recognised early on by the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (ESS)
(1930-5), which noted that the ‘enormous extension of the competence of
the state into cultural and economic spheres has considerably decreased the
sphere of the non-political’. As a result, the ‘distinction between political and
non-political ... is fraught with much practical difficulty’. 4 Expressions of
cultural identity which would previously have been politically neutral were
now taken as signs of loyalty or disloyalty to the state, a change that indi-
cates a fundamental transformation of the state itself. Despite understanding
that the development of modern states has affected the situation of national
groups within any given state, however, this article assumes their existence
as coherent and distinct groups to be independent of both the state and of
nationalism. 5

Of course, the concept of ‘minority’ did not achieve currency in inter-
national political discourse simply because people had thought of it in the
abstract as a problem of statecraft in the age of nationalism. The concept
solidified at a particular historical moment because it was seen to describe the
situation of certain groups at that moment, and the groups concerned were the
‘national minorities’ of central and eastern Europe. The re-drawing of the map
of post-war Europe, justified in terms of the principle of the self-determination
of peoples, had turned the continent into a crowded patchwork of new nation-
states, each associated with one particular ‘people’ or nationality. Members of
other nationalities resident in those states were in a new situation, summed up
by the opening definition of the 1935 article in the ESS:

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 23

The term national minority is applied to a distinct ethnic group with an individual
national and cultural character living within a state which is dominated by another
nationality and which is viewed by the latter as the particular expression of its own
identity . 6

That is, they had become minorities because they were now resident in states
which had majorities; whereas, previously, these groups had mostly been living
in multinational or, rather, non-national, states. (That a state could be viewed
as the ‘particular expression’ of a nationality’s identity was a novelty that was
not fully understood.) However, the term ‘minorities’ was not applied to all
groups resident in these states but not belonging to the ‘state people’. 7 The ESS
offered various criteria by which to define minorities: in this case, for example,
small and geographically dispersed groups were not to be considered ‘minori-
ties’. 8 Similar attempts to provide objective criteria by which a group can be
properly identified as a ‘minority’ (or not) are a common feature of reference
works down to the present time. Since minorities are subjective, not objective,
groups, as a rule such criteria only multiply inconsistencies - though they do
share a common tendency to assume that the groups concerned are objective,
discrete and primordial units. However, whereas later reference works differ
wildly in the groups they take to be minorities, at this early stage a common
defining characteristic was visible. While commentators did raise, with varying
degrees of unease, the possibility of applying the term to various other groups,
they concentrated on groups that had been recognised as such in international
law. 9 How did that recognition come about?

The powers involved in re-drawing the map of Europe, the United States
among them, were aware that creating new states or expanding existing ones
in accordance with the principle of self-determination of peoples would itself
create new problems and risks of war: national groups were intermingled,
not distributed in neat blocs across the landscape. Granting a state to a given
people on a given territory where that people was in a majority created the
problem of how to manage relations between the state and the ‘state people’,
on the one hand, and everyone else, on the other: the ‘minorities problem’.
The assumptions implicit in this characterisation of a problem - that popula-
tions are primordially separated into clearly-bounded, coherent units, and
that one state can represent only one such unit - are highly questionable, but
they were not widely questioned at the time: they underlay the politics of the
period as they underlie these reference works. One possible ‘solution’ to the
problem was population transfer. The largest-scale attempt was that between
Greece and Turkey; the ‘enormous sacrifices in life and health’ involved, 10
not to mention huge political, practical and moral difficulties, discouraged its
widespread adoption elsewhere before the Second World War, though other,
smaller attempts were made or considered in the 1920s and 1930s. (For the his-
torian, the exchange of often Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians for

24 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

sometimes Greek-speaking Muslims is a warning not to assume that ‘national’
groups exist as self-evident and discrete units: it took Greece and Turkey
enormous effort to forge those populations into ‘Greeks’ and ‘Turks’. 11 )

Population transfer having been generally rejected as a solution, measures
were instead taken to secure the rights of the new minorities through interna-
tional law. Beginning with the June 1919 treaty whereby Poland’s independ-
ence was recognised by the Allied and Associated Powers, a body of law arose
to protect ‘minority rights’. The League of Nations, once it was established,
oversaw existing treaties and made similar treaty guarantees a condition of
membership for new states . 12

Despite the (fairly) good intentions behind the establishment of this body
of law, its defects were obvious. The fact that it was applied to some states
and not others caused great resentment . 13 Minorities could not themselves
complain that their rights had been infringed: such complaints had to be raised
by a state or the League on their behalf. Nor was it clear exactly what consti-
tuted a ‘minority’, though as a rule simple realpolitik meant that only groups
belonging to a nationality that itself possessed a state elsewhere were officially
recognised: as noted above, these are the groups described as minorities in
scholarly work of the period . 14 These are defects in the very framework of the
law: in practice, the institutional working of the League meant that it granted
no real protection . 15 On the whole, the minorities treaties only exacerbated the
perception of each state concerned that its minorities were disloyal - that their
primary loyalty was to the (often hostile, sometimes neighbouring) state within
which their own nationality was the majority . 16 Nevertheless, the concept of
‘minority’ was now in widespread circulation thanks to this body of law. It
was commonly agreed to be meaningful, even if discord reigned as to its proper
application . 17

Although the early works consulted here were aware that the international
law of minorities was novel, and to an extent that ‘minority’ identities had
been made salient by recent political transformations, they already assumed
that the term, being accurate in their present, could also be applied to the past
- that if a group was a ‘minority’ today, it was one yesterday too. This was
a mistaken assumption. Even at this stage, so soon after the emergence of the
concept, its historical origins were being lost - with important consequences
for its analytical usefulness. Once it existed, the term acquired its own inertia:
it was applied to the past; it was adopted by groups not covered by the trea-
ties to describe their own situation; and it was used by scholars to describe yet
other groups in both present and past.

Some of this was foreseen by the League’s rapporteur on minorities, who in
1926 advised against the generalisation of the minorities regime to other states:

The introduction into the laws of all countries of provisions protecting minorities

would be enough to cause them to spring up where they were least expected, to

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 25

provoke unrest among them, to cause them to pose as having been sacrificed, and
generally to create an artificial agitation of which no one had up to that moment
dreamed . 18

This is too cynical in its presumption that ‘minorities’, outside the states where
they had already been recognised, would be purely artificial and opportunistic.
But it does reflect the way in which the usage of the concept, once it existed,
could not be restricted. Insofar as it was open to be adopted as a means of
gaining some sort of advancement or protection, the concept encouraged a
wide range of groups (especially disadvantaged ones) to constitute themselves
as ‘minorities’. However, in one respect the rapporteur was quite mistaken: the
generalisation of such legal protections was mostly irrelevant to this process.
Once the concept of ‘minority’ was in circulation, the possibility was open
for groups anywhere to adopt it to describe their own situation, whether they
were covered by minority guarantees or not. (Once again I am leaving aside
the obvious question: what makes a ‘group’?) Likewise, the way was open for
outsiders to start to define certain groups as minorities, not always for benign
purposes.

The Emergence of ‘Minorities’

The proliferation of the term ‘minority’ both inside and outside the academy
derives from its rhetorical force, not from its analytical usefulness. I have
already indicated that after the First World War the working definition in
international law, taken up by scholars, largely excluded groups that were not
represented by a state of their own elsewhere, even when their situation closely
resembled that of the recognised minorities. Attempts to provide objective cri-
teria for defining ‘minorities’ - though often made with the best of intentions
- have not increased the analytical force of the term.

One problem is that it is difficult to define a group as a minority by oppo-
sition to a majority within a state on cultural grounds alone, simply because
many such groups exist without any sense of being a ‘minority’. This problem
has led some commentators to stress that minorities are defined not just by
their collective belonging, but also by the collective disadvantages they face.
However, measures of disadvantage rarely apply only to groups that can
be defined as ‘minorities’ on cultural lines. The article on minorities in the
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences ( IESS ) 19 suggests that ‘a
minority’s position involves exclusion or assignment to a lower status in one or
more of four areas of life: the economic, the political, the legal, and the social-
associational’ 20 - domains of exclusion that may equally apply, collectively,
to members of the working class, and to their children. Such concentration on
disadvantages faced by ‘minorities’ risks taking for granted the existence of a
coherent and uniformly privileged majority, thereby obscuring the realities of

2 6 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

power distribution within a society, and especially within the majority. 21 This
is emphatically not to say that some minorities in modern societies do not
suffer real and durable collective disadvantages; but we should be aware that
the notion of ‘majority’ can do ideological work, and so - by reinforcing it -
can the notion of ‘minority’. 22 This point holds a fortiori in non-democratic
states: the public aggrandisement of the ‘nation’ or the ‘majority’, and the
identification and perhaps persecution of ‘minorities’, are powerful ideological
tools permitting closed and unaccountable regimes of all kinds to curtail the
political rights of their citizens, while presenting themselves as an expression
of the popular will. 23

The surprisingly common claim that ‘a minority need not be a numerical
minority’, 24 which presumably derives from the legal notion of the minor, is
also problematic. It is fairly clear from the etymological sources that in our
sense the term derives not from this legal concept but from the numerical
political meaning - a minority of voters within a representative assembly. 25
In any case, if oppressed groups are a numerical majority, why bother calling
them a ‘minority’ when ‘oppressed group’ is more accurate? 26 Especially since
such groups are likely to mobilise politically around the fact that they are
a numerical majority - one example, commonly cited as a minority before
1994, being black South Africans. 27 The term ‘minority’ became meaning-
ful precisely because being a numerical minority was what made certain
groups subordinate, and it serves no useful purpose to extend it to numerical
majorities.

Objective criteria for defining ‘minorities’ are unlikely to be found, and
the search for them has not been particularly helpful. It may be appropriate
to jettison the term as an analytical category, and it is certainly appropriate to
examine it carefully for the ideological baggage it carries, especially in imply-
ing the existence of a ‘majority’. This book, however, is not directly concerned
with whether ‘minority’ stands up as a valid category of analysis when used
by scholars, nor with particular minorities as objective groups within Syrian
society. It is concerned with the history of the concept itself: what were the
political conditions that made it meaningful to those who used it - as they
would not have done previously - in Syria during the French mandate; how
and why did particular actors deploy it? These questions help us recover the
historicity of the concept, and with it that of the majority.

That such an effort is worthwhile - indeed, necessary - is demonstrated
by any number of examples of the usage of the concept by scholars. One such
comes in the IESS article on minorities, which makes the following claim:

Some [European national minorities] are of very ancient origin, and their minority
status has not changed appreciably in centuries, such as the Basques in Spain and the
Greeks in Turkey, who also use a language different from that of the majority in their
respective countries . 28

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 27

To say of the Greeks in Turkey that ‘their minority status has not changed
appreciably in centuries’ is, simply, wrong. One might first note that until the
nineteenth century the terms ‘Greek’ and ‘Turkey’ would have had limited
significance to Greek Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire -
certainly it was by religion rather than language or ‘nationality’ that this group
was identified by the Ottoman state, and many Anatolian ‘Greeks’ spoke
Turkish as their language of ordinary use until after the population transfer.
One important change in this group’s status which has occurred since 1800
is the ‘nationalisation’ of Greek identity (and its closer association with the
Greek language) after the establishment of an independent Greece - an event
which also radically altered the prospects of ‘Greeks’ remaining in the empire.
State-building reform in the empire and its republican successor, meanwhile,
fundamentally changed the relationship between state and society, a process
which also brought into being a ‘Turkish’ majority where once there had
been Ottoman rulers and ‘Turk’ peasants. Finally, as a part of this process,
the number of Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire/Turkish
Republic declined precipitously both proportionately and absolutely, leaving
the remaining ‘Greeks’ as a much smaller group relative to a much more cohe-
sive ‘majority’ in an actively nationalist, Turkifying state. These are altogether
appreciable changes in the group’s status. Comparable changes have no doubt
affected the Basques in both Spain and France.

All of this history is elided if the historical origin of the concept of ‘minor-
ity’ is forgotten - if, once applied to a group in the modern period, it is
assumed to be a valid description of that group in the past. There is a real
danger of anachronism in too carelessly adopting ‘minority’ as a category
of analysis. It is in order to avoid such confusion that the remainder of this
chapter attempts to recover the historical origins of the concept of ‘minority’,
and find a more limited, but more satisfactory, way of using the concept to
understand the past.

I have already alluded to the reasons why the existence of numerically
inferior, culturally defined groups within states became politically salient, and
resulted in the emergence of the concept of the ‘minority’. These reasons lie in
the related development of modern states and nationalism. In a sense, there
was no articulated concept of ‘minority’ prior to the modern period because
minorities did not exist: the concept acquires meaning only once certain condi-
tions associated with the existence of modern nation-states have been fulfilled.
This is, obviously, not to say that the communities that later became minori-
ties did not exist, but rather that the term ‘minority’ does not usefully describe
their place in relation to the wider society and to the state.

In this section I outline some of the conditions that gave the term meaning.
The Ottoman Empire, the historical backdrop to the rest of this study, pro-
vides many of my examples. However, my purpose in this book is to provide
a case study in support of a general comparative argument, not to give an

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

isolated account of a particular place, diverting enough but of strictly local
interest. Therefore, I freely bring in examples from other parts of the world.
In doing so, I want to avoid the mistaken assumption that the history of state-
building in the later Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Middle East is one
of catching up (or failing to catch up) with European states. As they under-
went this process of transformation, the Ottoman Empire and the states that
replaced it were not catching up with norms that had already been established
in European states. The emergence of minorities (and majorities, and nation-
states) took place in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Levant at the same time
as it occurred in much of Europe - not later. As Selim Deringil remarks in his
study of the ideology of the late Ottoman state, the Ottoman experience paral-
leled ‘the broad sweep of change that was taking place in European societies
as a whole at the same period ’. 29 If this becomes particularly clear when the
empire is compared with the other European dynastic empires, it nonetheless
frequently holds for a comparison with states further west too. The conditions
in which the terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ become meaningful developed
quite recently everywhere.

Philosophically, the most important precondition for the emergence of minori-
ties is the existence of a concept of representative government. Under what
Niyazi Berkes calls the medieval view of society, the ruler did not represent the
ruled: he represented the will of God . 30 In the Ottoman case, it is hardly con-
troversial to observe that for most of its existence the state made no claim to
represent the population. A divinely appointed sultan had no need to represent
his subjects, though he certainly claimed the right to rule over them. This is not
to claim that the sultan’s subjects passively accepted his authority; but when
that authority was challenged, as it frequently was, it was not on the grounds
that the sultan had failed to ‘represent’ a ‘majority’ of the population. More
usually it was on the grounds that he had failed to ensure the stable balance of
the correct social ‘order’ (nizam ). 31

Representative government fundamentally alters the relationship between
rulers and ruled. Propelling the spread of a concept of representative govern-
ment is the state’s need to make ever greater direct demands on the population.
The population, naturally, bargains hard in return for concessions from the
state . 32 It is no longer seen as legitimate for states to have no other link to the
populations they rule than the coercive extraction of surplus. Previously it was
acceptable - indeed, necessary - for the ruling ideology to be one that sharply
differentiated between rulers and ruled: ‘To be Ottoman was ... to maintain
an imperial difference between sultan and subjects .’ 33 But now, an ideology of
cohesiveness develops as the terrain on which this bargaining can take place.
This is not a purely top-down development: it arises from the compromise
between pressure from above and resistance from below. The notion of repre-
sentativity is part of this ideology of cohesiveness: the state is no longer above

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 29

the people, but of the people. 34 Dynastic states lose their raison d’etre at this
stage if the monarchy cannot identify itself with the population. 35

The notion of representative government is not imposed from above: rulers
adopt it in response to pressure from below. The representation involved,
however, does generally spread from top to bottom, as the sections of the
population with which the state must deal directly gradually widens from
dominant elites to the whole of the population; that is, as the state’s direct
demands fall on ever wider sections of society, from aristocrats and perhaps
clergy in the first instance to an urban bourgeoisie and other property-holders,
to all adult males, and eventually (in the twentieth century, under the impulse
of the mobilisation of entire populations for total war) to all adult women
also. 36 It is when the concept of representativity is widened to embrace the
entire population at the level of individual households (represented through
their adult males) that the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ start to apply to the
whole population, rather than to members of a town or communal council, or
all property-owning voters. 37

It must be emphasised here that the concept of representative government
does not imply democracy. What is at issue is whether the state claims to rep-
resent the population: whether that representation is democratic or not is irrel-
evant. Kemal Ataturk was no democrat, but he based his legitimacy entirely on
his claim to represent the Turkish ‘people’. The claim to be representative is
frequently used by states and rulers precisely to foreclose the possibility of any
real democratic representation - a similar point to the one made above about
the concept of the ‘majority’. The fact that many non-democratic regimes call
themselves democratic simply shows the rhetorical power of that concept in
buttressing the notion of representativity.

In the Ottoman Empire, as elsewhere, the concept of representative govern-
ment spread to touch the entire population in the nineteenth century. 38 While
Ottoman sultans by no means abandoned the claim to divine right and to
religious legitimation, the state sought to widen its repertoire of legitimating
practices. (Both of these statements apply to other European monarchies that
survived the century: British monarchs retained the claim to reign deo gratia,
although the British state no longer legitimated itself purely by that claim.)
This widening was the aim of the tanzimat reforms, which for the first time
introduced the notion that the state represented as well as ruling the popula-
tion. Later changes in the empire’s ruling ideology - notably a renewed use
of Islam as a basis for legitimation under Abdiilhamid II (discussed below)
- retained the notion of representation. It would be wrong to see this develop-
ment as an adoption of foreign practices. The internal dynamic of state-society
relations drove reform, even if external pressure made it imperative.

The concept of representative government is, as noted earlier, part of
an ideology of cohesiveness that creates a terrain on which the interaction
between state and society - with demands and resistance emanating from both

30 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

sides - is played out. But it is only one part of that ideology. For the population
to take seriously the state’s claim to represent it, the relationship between them
must be defined: who, precisely, does the state claim to represent?

One part of this process of definition is the establishment of fixed borders,
territorially defining the population upon which the state can make demands
- and vice versa. But in the modern period, the demands made by both sides
have steadily increased: states demand individual income tax, general conscrip-
tion, attendance at school; populations demand a greater say in how revenue
is spent, healthcare, education. This is the stuff of politics in modern states,
and the population’s mere residence on the state’s territory has not usually
provided a strong enough connection to bear the weight of such politics. A
stronger link is needed, usually based on shared culture: the state demonstrates
that it is of the people by sharing their ‘national identity’; this, in turn, provides
the population with a basis for making their demands.

The pressure to create such a cultural link may come from the state (as in
France) or from segments of the population in opposition to the state (as with
separatist nationalisms in the Austro-Hungarian Empire): both trends can be
observed in the Ottoman case. Either way, it makes the relative numbers of dif-
ferent culturally defined groups increasingly salient. When such pressure comes
from the state there is an obvious benefit in assuming or idealising a cultural
identity that is shared by, or at least acceptable to, a majority of the population.
Likewise, if members of a culturally defined group come to see the ruling state
as alien, and therefore reject it as not representing them, their likely response
will either be to take over the state for themselves (if the group, as they consti-
tute it, represents a numerical majority within the existing state) or to try and
break away and form a new state within which they are a numerical majority.
Charles Tilly shows how these two currents strengthen each other, with

the attempt of rulers to commit their subjects to the national cause generating resist-
ance on the part of unassimilated minorities, [and] the demand of unrepresented
minorities for political autonomy fostering commitment to the existing state on the
part of those who benefit most from its existence . 39

In either case, number becomes increasingly important. As states old and new
come to present themselves as sharing the identity of a ‘majority’, those cultur-
ally defined groups that fall outside the definition of national identity adopted
by the state but inside its geographical borders become ‘minorities’. Since
populations are rarely homogeneous, with territories of any size containing
culturally diverse populations, ‘minorities’ appear almost everywhere.

The link between the concepts of representative government and national
identity is easy to see. 40 Their development together is what allowed the ESS
to describe a Europe, after the First World War, where each state was viewed
by a given ‘nationality’ as ‘the particular expression of its own identity’: 41 in

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 31

other words, nation-states. But as cultural identity became more salient in the
relationship between state and society, it also became more likely to mark lines
of conflict between them. In the pre-modern era it was sometimes problematic
for religiously-legitimated states to rule over populations belonging to a differ-
ent faith; in modern times there are far more potential points of disagreement,
since ‘nations’ define themselves using varying combinations of language,
ethnicity, geography, religion and (supposed) shared history, and the state’s
activities have expanded into cultural fields. The terms ‘minority’ and ‘major-
ity’ having already become relevant at the level of the entire population, this is
when their extended meaning as permanent political groupings defined by their
cultural identity emerges. 42

So far, this analysis has been presented as if, in these circumstances, pre-
defined groups already exist. This is a misleading simplification: social groups
are also produced, or produce themselves, through this process, and cultural
identities refashioned or (re)invented - the example of the ‘Greeks’ in Turkey,
or indeed the ‘Turks’, illustrates this. Notably, boundaries between culturally
defined groups often harden as they become associated with political identities
relative to the state, much more so in the modern period than previously. This
is always a dialectic process in which different groups define themselves in
relation to one another and the state, with the state sometimes serving as the
instrument of one group. In the definition of a ‘majority’ and ‘minorities’, each
side of the process depends on the other.

The Ottoman state did not - for most of its history - claim a cultural
affinity between itself and all groups within the population, any more than
it claimed to represent a ‘majority’. In a religiously-legitimated monarchy,
whether or not the ruler shares the language or ‘ethnicity’ of the ruled is irrel-
evant. 43 Nor need he even share their religious beliefs, since he draws his right
to rule from his own religion. Religious differences may become politically
salient in the relationship between ruler and ruled, as in Europe during and
after the Reformation, but this is by no means inevitable. 44 The empire claimed
an Islamic identity which it shared with a substantial part of the population,
but whether that part was a numerical majority or minority of the population
was irrelevant. The Arab caliphates had ruled over a majority of non-Muslims
for centuries; so did the Ottomans in their Balkan provinces. Indeed, since the
early Ottoman sultans won substantial territories in the Balkans before they
expanded into the Levant, Arabia and Egypt, ‘before the sixteenth century they
probably ruled over more Christians than they did Muslims’. 45 Islamic law pro-
vided a place in the social and political order for non-Muslims, and although
this was a structurally subordinate place it was nevertheless guaranteed by the
state. And, of course, non-Muslims were not subordinated because they were a
minority (often they were not), but because they were non-Muslims. Under this
system of government, whose ordering principle was religious (with no direct
reference to number), ethnic identity had very limited political salience. The

32 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Ottoman state required that its servants speak Ottoman Turkish, not that they
be ‘Turks’. State functions were assigned to members of the different religious
communities, not to members of ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ groups.

It was only in the nineteenth century that this began to change, as the
empire - like other states - shifted towards an idea of representative gov-
ernment. At the same time as the state came under pressure from separatist
nationalisms that presented it as alien to ‘their’ nationality - mobilisations
which, at the risk of repetition, themselves involved constituting a new form of
political identity - it also adopted measures to promulgate a cultural identity
of its own. The Ottomanism of mid-century, the Hamidian Islamism that fol-
lowed it and, eventually, the current of Turkish nationalism can all be seen in
this light, with separatist nationalisms acting as both a counter-current and an
example. Ottomanism was a culturally diffuse concept, based on a putative
shared loyalty to the institutions of the state and residence on the territory. Its
vagueness was deliberate: Ottomanism was concerned with overcoming the
growing centrifugal forces within the empire, particularly among Christian
populations, and therefore needed to be as inclusive as possible - in a sense, to
forestall the emergence of minorities by making everyone a part of an Ottoman
nation. (It also existed alongside an older and sometimes oppositional concept
of the Islamically-legitimated state which would prove to be both resilient and
flexible.) Other states in comparable situations in this period adopted similar
solutions: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, tried to build a sense
of national identity based on loyalty to the emperor and shared belonging to
the ‘Imperial Fatherland’, as well as through the multiplication of bureaucratic
institutions to give every part of the population a stake in the state apparatus . 46
While the vagueness of Ottomanism was necessary given the diversity of the
empire’s population, it made the concept less effective as a mobilising ideology
in the face of the more exclusive separatist nationalisms that developed, and
attracted foreign support, within the population.

One reason for Islam’s renewed prominence as a source of legitimacy and
as a cultural identity linking state and society as a whole in the later nineteenth
century was that in this period Muslims finally became an overwhelming
numerical majority in the empire . 47 This was partly the result of the loss of
most of the Balkan provinces, especially after the 1877-8 war with Russia:
the Christian populations remained in the newly formed Balkan states, while
large numbers of Muslim refugees fled from them into the remaining terri-
tory of the empire . 48 (Many others were massacred.) Starting in mid-century,
Russian control in the Caucasus was also consolidated, causing a substantial
wave of Muslim immigration to the empire . 49 For these reasons, the number of
Christians in the empire fell sharply in this period, both proportionately and
absolutely, while that of Muslims increased . 50 We can begin to speak meaning-
fully of a Muslim majority in the empire by the late nineteenth century: not
only because, in numerical terms, there certainly was one, but because the

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 33

state was self-consciously claiming to represent that majority and to promote
Islam as a more robust cultural link between itself and the population than
Ottomanism. However, given the numerous ethnolinguistic divisions within
the Ottoman Muslim community it remains dangerous to assume that the
Muslim majority was a coherent political grouping: the various ethnolinguis-
tically-based nationalisms already developing within that community would
soon demonstrate that it was not.

Several other developments that mark the transformation of the state in the
modern period can be seen as preconditions to the emergence of ‘minorities’
and a ‘majority’. They spread over the boundary between philosophy and
political geography. As we have already seen, the concepts of representative
government and national identity develop together; these factors, too, develop
as part of the same process.

As the concept of representative government spreads, for example, it is
embodied in common institutions operating across the entire territory and
touching the entire population. Most important, perhaps, is the institution of
common citizenship, but also included are such essential parts of a modern
state as a judicial system which operates in more or less the same way across
the territory, and on all individuals within it; a state education system with a
common curriculum and a state language; 51 and such ‘representative’ insti-
tutions as may exist as a link between state and population (whether truly
representative or not). These either replace or subsume to one state-wide
framework the multiple local and regional institutions of varying power and
influence which are common in pre-modern states - where, under the tenuous
sovereignty of one ruler, different groups within the population, or different
regions, may for example be subject to quite different legal systems. 52 Much
of the process of Ottoman reform in the last century of the empire’s existence
can be interpreted in this way: consider, for example, the standardisation of
law under the mejelle, which attempted to reduce discrepancies both in local
customary law and in the communal law of the millet system, and also hoped
(unsuccessfully) to overcome the exceptional status of the mixed courts; or the
development of a common Ottoman citizenship, which attempted to stand-
ardise the relationship between members of different millets and the state.
Concentrating on the fact that the tanzimat enshrined legal equality for non-
Muslims, scholarly literature has often ignored the fact that these reforms also
introduced a concept of equal citizenship for all Muslims, too.

Ussama Makdisi has drawn the contrast between the tanzimat period
and earlier phases of the relationship between Ottoman state and popula-
tion: ‘After the nineteenth century, Ottoman reformers sought to nationalize
(Ottomanize) the empire and ultimately to absorb the margins into a cohesive
and uniform Ottoman modernity.’ 53 While far from wholly successful, these
reforms did fundamentally alter the relationship between individual Ottomans

34 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

and the state. They also mirror transformations of the state in other countries
in this period: Britain, for example, where the emancipation of Catholics
and later Jews occurred at around the same time, or the United States, where
slavery was abolished towards the end of the tanzimat period - an extension
of citizenship that led to a far greater ‘crisis of the state’ than anything the
tanzimat provoked.

Just as important to the development of a sense of national identity is
the development of a public sphere going beyond educated elites. Benedict
Anderson’s lastingly influential analysis has shown how important this is to the
development of modern nationalism . 54 This is somewhat more distinct from the
state than the kinds of institution mentioned above, but in a sense they contrib-
ute to it. Institutions such as citizenship or an education system act to establish
the sense of commonality (of interest and experience) on which a public sphere
going beyond a local level depends. They also, thereby, work strongly to stake
out ‘national’ boundaries within the public sphere. And such institutions also
create cadres who are among the public sphere’s most active participants: thus
the schoolteacher as the iconic figure of the French Third Republic.

Even in the modern period, we have already seen that the formulations
‘minority’ and ‘majority’ may gloss over divisions within a society and obscure
the very different relationships that individuals or groups within the majority
and the minorities have with the state. In the pre-modern period, the absence
of common institutions and a public sphere makes it hard to see what meaning
the term ‘majority’ could have had at the level of the population as a whole.
It implies a perception of commonality of interest and experience which self-
evidently does not, and cannot, exist of itself. The developments outlined here,
and no doubt others besides, are necessary before that perception can exist.
Whether that perception is true or false is another question.

Developing alongside the common institutions described above is the
notion of uniform state authority over a permanent national territory, replac-
ing the formally and informally differentiated state authority and weaker
philosophical link between state and territory that were normal prior to the
modern period . 55 Because modern states do claim a uniform sovereignty over
the entire territory, and in many cases possess the means to enforce that claim
(or at least punish those who challenge it), it is hard to remember that until
recently states did not - and could not - make such claims. In these circum-
stances, culturally-differentiated groups in areas away from the main centres
of state authority were not under anything like the same pressure to conform
to state-imposed norms that they are today.

To an extent the same goes even in centres of state authority, because that
authority was more likely to bend itself to, or at least accommodate, local
factors than it was to impose common norms. For example, by comparison
with the Balkan mountains, the Jabal Hawran, or the Arabian desert, Ottoman
authority was strong in Salonica, Damascus and Mecca; but the three cities

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 35

operated under very different regimes. At the level of the city it would be pos-
sible to argue, without having to make heroic assumptions at the level of the
empire about the coherence of a non-Jewish majority and the uniform author-
ity of a non-Jewish state, that the small Jewish community of Damascus con-
stituted a ‘minority’ in more than a numerical sense. Whether the same could
be said of the Jews of Salonica, a city which they dominated not only numeri-
cally but also economically and socially (at all levels), and where ‘the docks
stood silent on the Jewish Sabbath’, 56 is doubtful. As state authority comes to
be more uniformly applied, through the instrument of a state apparatus that
functions more uniformly at the level of the entire territory and population,
and as common institutions and a public sphere at the state-wide level develop,
communities of all kinds gain a sense of their place relative to a greater whole.

The geographical limits of that whole are set by an important development
in political geography: the establishment of fixed borders with a state’s author-
ity on either side, a process closely related to the spread of the state’s physical
presence across its territory. This is relevant to the emergence of ‘minorities’
because, within each state, it restricts to that state the field of political action
open to subordinate communities. If a subordinate community under threat
can simply pack its bags and head west of its own free will, as it were, then it
has a freedom of action which a minority group within a modern state does not
have, however traumatic such a migration may be in practice. Among count-
less examples are successive waves of nomadic migrations west out of central
Asia under pressure from the east; English Dissenters fleeing for America;
Boers moving north through southern Africa at the time of the British occu-
pation of the Cape; or Caucasian Muslims fleeing to the Ottoman Empire to
escape Russian imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. Modern minori-
ties under threat have a much more limited range of options: flight, individu-
ally or en masse, can only take them to another nation-state where they may be
assimilated to the majority (at best), become an immigrant minority, or remain
as stateless refugees (at worst). 57

The establishment of fixed borders, like many other of the developments
described above, is underpinned by the extension of modern communications:
a transformation in physical geography that permits some approximation in
reality of the uniform application of state authority, for example, as well as
the establishment of a common public sphere. The extension of the state’s
real authority over its entire territory and population brings communities
which might previously have been semi-autonomous into permanent and
direct contact with the state, and fixes them within a state structure where
they are in a minority. 58 For the Ottoman Empire, the Druzes of Mount
Lebanon and the Elawran are an obvious example; less obviously, because a
larger and more diverse community, it is unlikely that the Christians of the
Ottoman Balkans would have considered themselves to be a minority before
the nineteenth century at the very earliest - if they ever did. Muslims may

3 6 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

have been a majority, though not an overwhelming one, in the empire as a
whole; but before the spread of modern communications the empire did not
act as a whole, and in the Balkans the Christians were a numerical majority. It
was in the period of the tanzimat that infrastructural developments (railways,
telegraphs, steamships) started to tie the territory together - putting the state
apparatus more firmly, and more immediately, under the direct control of the
centre, and simultaneously giving the population more direct access to the
central state. 59 Similar processes were occurring in other European states at
the same time, as Eugen Weber has perhaps most famously described. 60

It is difficult to separate out these preconditions, or to say with any certainty
which way causation runs between them. The processes involved contribute to
and reinforce one another. Moreover, it should be apparent that these precon-
ditions - and the list is not exhaustive - are ideals, not realities. Many of them
could never be fully achieved. Even today, the authority of the most powerful
states is not uniform across the territory, weakening in remote rural areas or
urban areas whose populations are hostile to state intrusion. 61 In other states
the differentiation is greater, and may be extreme. There are also frequently
exceptions to supposedly common state institutions: witness the peculiar and
possibly unconstitutional status relative to Congress of Washington, DC; the
exceptions to French citizenship once applied to Algerian Muslims - nonethe-
less French subjects - under the code de I’indigenat ; or the inconsistencies
arising from devolution in the United Kingdom (the ‘West Lothian question’).
Such exceptions, whether made for particular regions or particular groups
within the population, often represent practical solutions to the problem of
government - but they may pose serious existential questions for the state.
Sometimes it is the very creation of a common institution which causes the
problem, as when formal citizenship or nationality laws institutionalise
the exclusion or subordination of certain residents within a territory - one
example being immigrants and their offspring, down to the third resident
generation and counting in Germany. Such institutions inevitably create excep-
tions, and the argument over where to draw their limits underlies much of
modern politics. If most borders, meanwhile, are now clearly delineated on
maps, they frequently remain porous: state authority is rarely uniform along
their length. 62 Above all, national identity usually escapes precise definition.

What is important, however, is not that these ideals exist in reality, but
that states, their rulers and their citizens act as if they exist. In the era of the
nation-state, this is largely the case. Taken altogether, the adoption of these
ideals as something approaching norms represents a radical transformation of
the state - a transformation which has taken place across the globe over the
last two centuries. It is not final - the current preoccupation of scholars and
journalists with ‘globalisation’ is one indicator of this - but it is the framework
for this study.

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 37

It is this transformation of the state which gives meaning to the twin con-
cepts of majority and minority, understood as groups within a population:
terms which emerged in a specific, contemporary context. This transformation
has so profoundly marked our era that it is difficult to imagine how different
the past was - to imagine, for example, that political categories which are
fundamental to us could have been literally unthinkable so short a time ago.
But outside the specific, contemporary context of the nation-state it is difficult
to see what meaning these two concepts could have. Put simply, the burden of
proof is on anyone who claims that majority is a valid term of analysis when
applied to the past to show how a coherent ‘majority’ could possibly have been
constituted without all these various developments that we take for granted in
modern states; likewise for ‘minority’. Each of these terms implies a relation-
ship between the state and the population - above all, between the state and
the supposed majority - which simply did not exist previously. The concepts
would have been meaningless to residents of the Ottoman Empire for most of
its long history. Neither are they useful from the historian’s point of view until
late in the day, since the conditions which make them meaningful were absent.
Those conditions were developing in the later Ottoman period. But it was not
until the mandate period, when these concepts became fully developed in inter-
national political discourse, that individual actors began consciously to refer to
themselves as members of a majority or a minority.

The argument that majority and minority are not meaningful concepts
outside the context of a modern nation-state also has a ‘reverse implication’:
namely, that tracing the emergence and development of these concepts is a
useful way of studying the development of modern nation-states, without
adopting (knowingly or not) the categories that the nation-state itself creates.
Paradoxically, focusing on minorities as central to the state permits us to get
beyond a state-centred analysis, because instead of assuming the existence of
powerful state norms it enables us to see how those norms gradually devel-
oped and imposed themselves. This is a worthwhile task, since the nation-state
form has shaped recent world history. As Benedict Anderson puts it, ‘When
the forty-two founding members of the League of Nations assembled in 1920,
they inaugurated an era in which the nation became the only internationally
legitimate state form.’ 63 This book proposes to use the concept of ‘minority’
not as an analytical category, but as a subject of study in its own right - one
that will shed light on the process of state formation in the modern Middle
East and elsewhere.

Notes

1. Alan Bullock et al., The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (London: Harper
& Row, 1988), ‘Minorities’.

2. Henceforward OED.

38 J

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

3. Kedourie, ‘Ethnicity, majority, and minority in the Middle East’.

4. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 1930-5 (henceforward ESS 1935):
‘Minorities, National’ - the only minorities covered by this encyclopaedia. The
following entry, ‘Minority Rights’, is mostly a discussion of the rights of minorities
of voters vis-a-vis the majority in democratic political theory, not minority rights
in the modern sense.

5. This is not surprising: the article’s author, Max Hildebert Boehm, was a prominent
German Volk sociologist whose ideas (notably Volksgemeinschaft - the Volk as a
primordial entity sharing common interests) were well adapted to the corporatist
ideology of the Nazi regime. Boehm was appointed to a professorship under the
Nazis, whom he enthusiastically supported. (Christa Kamenetsky, ‘Folklore as a
political tool in Nazi Germany’, Journal of American Folklore (1972), 85(337):
221-35; E. K. Francis, ‘Minority groups - a revision of concepts’, British Journal
of Sociology (1951), 2(3): 219-29, 254, n. 1.)

6. ESS 1935: ‘Minorities, National’.

7. Arendt takes the term ‘state people’, with due reservations, from the texts of the
post-First World War peace treaties: The Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 9.

8. It is notable that the criteria established by Boehm, while by no means restricted
to German minorities in central and eastern Europe, would confer on them clear
‘minority’ status. Boehm’s assertion of the rights of such minorities to privileged
contact with the ‘mother country’ stands out in this respect as presaging subse-
quent traumas.

9. See, e.g., Encyclopaedia Britannica 1929: ‘Minorities’; EES 1935: ‘Minorities,
National’. The 1975 Grand Larousse de la langue franfaise cites its own 1931
edition as a source when it defines ‘minority’ in this sense: ‘En termes de droit
international, communaute qui, a l’interieure d’un Etat, represente un petit nombre
d’individus qui ont en commun un certain nombre de caracteres (race, langue,
religion).’

10. ESS 1935: ‘Minorities, National’

11. See, among others, Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: Eton’ Mass Expulsion Forged
Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta, 2006); Anastasia Karakasidou,
Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia,
1870-1990 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chs 5-7; and the
articles in Renee Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the
1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (Oxford:
Berghahn, 2003).

12. Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe’,
Daedalus (1997), 126(2): 47-63. These treaties drew on the historical precedent
of nineteenth-century treaties that, without describing such groups as ‘minorities’,
included clauses on the status of religious groups.

13. Howard B. Calderwood, ‘International affairs: The proposed generalization of
the minorities regime’, The American Political Science Review (1934), 28(6):
1088-98.

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 39

14. Jews were a partial exception in that, despite lacking any such legal safeguards,
they were widely accepted to constitute a ‘minority’ in the states concerned - a
semi-official recognition that can be ascribed to the active, but ultimately unsuc-
cessful, participation of Jewish delegations during the post-First World War peace
negotiations. Arendt terms them the ‘minor ite par excellence ’: The Origins of
Totalitarianism, pp. 289-90.

15. An account of the institutional barriers is given in ESS 1935: ‘Minorities, National’.

16. The presence of inverted commas should generally be assumed around the words
minority, majority and nationality. For the functioning and failings of the treaties,
and their implications, see Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 269-76.

17. Chapter 5 discusses this body of law and its application to Syria.

18. Quoted in Calderwood, ‘The proposed generalization of the minorities regime’,
p. 1092. The rapporteur was citing, approvingly, the opinion of Dutch senator
Baron Wittert van Hoogland.

19. Henceforward IESS, 1968 successor to the earlier ESS.

20. IESS 1968: ‘Minorities’.

21. Ellis Ernest Cashmore et al.. Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations, 4th edn
(London: Routledge, 1996): ‘Minorities’.

22. Barton Meyers, ‘Minority group: an ideological formulation’, Social Problems
(1984), 32(1): 1-15.

23. Dr James McDougall kindly drew my attention to this point, with a forceful analy-
sis of North African politics.

24. Paul Clarke and Joe Foweraker (eds), Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought
(London: Routledge, 2001), ‘Minorities’.

25. See also Kedourie, ‘Ethnicity, majority, and minority in the Middle East’.

26. Meyers, ‘Minority group’, is not alone in making this point.

27. E.g., in IESS 1968: ‘Minorities’.

28. IESS 1968: ‘Minorities’.

29. Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of
Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), p. 8.

30. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill
University Press, 1964), pp. 8-10.

31. Inalcik and Quataert also discuss the role of nizanr. ‘the general principle was
adhered to that each individual should remain in his own status group so that
equilibrium in the state and society could be maintained’: An Economic and Social
History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), p. 17.

32. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1992, revised
paperback ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), especially ch. 4. NB: It would be a
mistake to assume a singularity of purpose on the part of the entire population, or
indeed the entire state apparatus, in this process.

33. Makdisi, ‘Ottoman orientalism’, para. 12.

34. When colonial states made the same demands on the population without

40 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

representation, the opposition came to justify itself precisely by claiming to
represent the population.

35. For the British case, see Linda Colley’s account of the reign of George III: by the
time he died, it was ‘axiomatic that royal celebration should ideally involve all
political affiliations, all religious groupings and all parts of Great Britain: in other
words, that it should at least seem to be authentically national and not sectional
celebration’: Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, 2nd edn (London: Yale
University Press, 2005), p. 231.

36. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States.

37. Kedourie, ‘Ethnicity, majority, and minority in the Middle East’.

38. A classic account of this can be found in Roderic H. Davison, ‘The advent of the
principle of representation in the government of the Ottoman empire’, in Essays
in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774-1923: The Impact of the West (London:
Saqi Books, 1990), pp. 96-111. Davison concentrates on elected institutions, a
narrower meaning of representation than that outlined here. I suspect he also over-
estimates the extent to which representation was a ‘Western’ import rather than
something driven by internal dynamics of the Ottoman state-society relationship.

39. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, pp. 116-17. 1 am making the slightly
different point, however, that groups come to be defined as ‘minorities’ through
this process.

40. Again, there is nothing to stop a profoundly unrepresentative regime legitimating
itself by claiming some kind of representativity - the concept of national identity
makes this easier.

41. ESS 1935: ‘Minorities, National’.

42. Kedourie, ‘Ethnicity, majority, and minority in the Middle East’.

43. Cf. Benedict Anderson on the ‘dynastic realm’: Imagined Communities: Reflections
on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991),
pp. 19-22.

44. Even when religion does become salient in the relationship between ruler and
ruled, it is not necessarily correct to assume that a ‘majority’ dynamic is at work
- that it has become impossible for a ruler belonging to a ‘minority’ faith to rule
over a ‘majority’ belonging to another. It may well be more accurate to say that
the religion not of a majority but of certain influential groups - aristocrats, urban
middle classes, an established clergy - is what matters.

45. Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and fetus, 1430-
1950 (London: HarperPerennial, 2005), p. 25.

46. Deringil, The Well-protected Domains, pp. 16-17; Norman Stone, Europe
Transformed 1878-1919, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 236.

47. Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in
the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (London: University of California Press, 1997),
ch. 1; Albert H. Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber & Faber,
1991), p. 309. Deringil, The Well-protected Domains, examines Ottoman self-
legitimation in this period.

Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-state [ 41

48. Kemal Karpat, ‘The status of the Muslim under European rule: the eviction and
settlement of the Qerkes’, in Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History:
Selected Articles and Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 647-75; Inalcik and
Quataert, An Economic and Social History, p. 782, who also note (p. 792) a lesser
but not insignificant contribution to the shifting balance: the increase in emigration
to the Americas in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Most emigrants were
Christians.

49. Inalcik and Quataert, An Economic and Social History, pp. 794-5; Karpat, ‘The
status of the Muslim’, p. 72. Karpat notes that some of the Circassians fled twice:
from the Caucasus to the Balkans in the 1860s, and from the Balkans to Anatolia
and the Levant in the 1870s. James Meyer argues that the Russian Empire gener-
ally tried to keep hold of its Muslim population, and notes that some (though not
many) migrants returned to Russia temporarily or permanently. Others retained
their Russian citizenship and used it to gain access to Russian consular protec-
tion in the Ottoman Empire: ‘Immigration, return, and the politics of citizenship:
Russian Muslims in the Ottoman empire, 1860-1914’, International Journal of
Middle East Studies (2007), 39(1): 15-32.

50. Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, ch. 1.

51. The process of language standardisation is clearly a crucial one, but far too large a
subject to go into detail here. Etienne Balibar brilliantly links language and school,
and shows that the development of a national language is marked by the stratifica-
tion of ‘levels of language’ within one language: Etienne Balibar, ‘The nation form:
history and ideology’, in E. Balibar and I. M. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class:
Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 86-106, especially 97-9.

52. In Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), Karen Barkey offers a sophisticated account
of (flexibly) structured difference along these lines as the factor underpinning the
Ottoman Empire’s success and longevity.

53. Makdisi, ‘Ottoman orientalism’, para. 8.

54. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

55. See Chapter 3. Balibar places the transformations discussed here earlier, with
the development of absolute monarchy that ‘brought with it effects of monetary
monopoly, administrative and fiscal centralization and a relative degree of stand-
ardization of the legal system and internal “pacification”. It thus revolutionized the
institutions of the frontier and the territory ’: ‘The nation form’, p. 87, emphasis
in original. I take the point, but would argue that (1) it is more likely to hold for
France than for other states and (2) if these processes began earlier, they reached a
new intensity in modern states - notably revolutionary France.

56. Mazower, Salonica, p. 8. This was the case as late as 1912.

57. Hannah Arendt expresses this problem in her stark description of inter-war
Europe, with its ‘migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in
the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere.
Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

42 J

state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they
were rightless, the scum of the earth.’ The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 267.

58. See Chapters 3 and 4.

59. On the impact of the telegraph in this respect, e.g., see Eugene Rogan, ‘Instant
communication: the impact of the telegraph in Ottoman Syria’, in Thomas
Philipp and Birgit Schaebler (eds), The Syrian Land: Processes of Integration and
Fragmentation. Bilcid al-Shdm from the 18th to the 20th Century (Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag, 1998), pp. 113-28.

60. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France,
1870-1914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977).

61. James Scott shows that this point holds even in cities designed on a grid pattern,
for maximum ‘legibility’ and accessibility, in powerful modern states: Seeing like
a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed
(London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 56, n. 12.

62. This has been the case since the Ottoman-Persian Treaty of Zuhab in May 1639,
‘the oldest explicit demarcation based on geography rather than on purely the clar-
ification of judicial rights between states. Unfortunately, the wording of the treaty
was vague, and the reality on the ground was a wide and porous autonomous zone
that tribesmen crossed at will, despite the existence of border posts scattered along
a nominal frontier line.’ Peter Barber and Tom Harper, Magnificent Maps: Power,
Propaganda and Art (London: The British Library, 2010), p. 116.

63 Anderson, ‘Nationalism’.

CHAPTER

2

'MINORITIES' AND THE FRENCH MANDATE

Introduction

The accusation of having mutilated Syrian unity ... is laid against us by Arabizers
who call themselves patriots and whose design is evident: adversaries of the
mandate, what they want is an independent Syria where the 1,500,000 Muslims
would subjugate the half-million Christians. If this state of affairs came about,
it would not only be the end of western influence in the Orient: it would be the
opening of an era of disorders and massacres. Greater Lebanon is a rampart against
invasive panarabism and Islamic persecution. The institution of the mandate had
precisely the aim of preventing, in the anarchic unchaining of fanaticisms, the most
frightful religious war. 1

This extract from Robert de Beauplan’s 1929 work Ou va la Syrie ? is fairly
typical of French imperialist writings on Syria in the 1920s. Rejecting the
notion of a territorially or socially unified Syria - ‘the Syrian nation is a
myth’, Beauplan affirms elsewhere 2 - it stresses the religious divisions within
Syrian society and assumes a latent persecuting fanaticism on the part of
Syria’s Muslims. It justifies the French presence, and the administrative divi-
sions France had imposed in the mandate territories, as the only thing stand-
ing between Syrian Christians and massacre. It cites the mandate in support
of French rule. And, despite referring to the numerical inferiority of the
Christians, it lacks any explicit reference to minorities.

This chapter places the emergence of ‘minorities’ in Syria in the context of
the French mandate. It focuses on the interplay between two distinct factors:
first, the policies the French put in place in Syria in order to structure, and

[ 43 ]

44 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

exacerbate, the divisions between Syria’s diverse communities; and, second,
and more profound in its effects, the transition to a nation-state form.

If the Ottoman Empire remained a dynastic empire to the end, the states
that replaced it - Syria among them - were constituted as nation-states rep-
resentative of their populations from the outset, and recognised as such by
the League of Nations. In that formal, institutional sense the end of the First
World War was a decisive turning point in the Middle East, though the break
between what went before and what came after was less radical than that
might imply. Like other states in Europe and elsewhere, the Ottoman Empire
in the nineteenth century had adopted many of the characteristics of a nation-
state, as the previous chapter described; and, as elsewhere, the transition to a
nation-state form masked many continuities.

In the new nation-states of the post-war period in central and eastern
Europe, and in what became the Republic of Turkey, the relationship between
each state and its new minorities was essentially bilateral, despite external
intervention by the League of Nations - through the minorities treaties - and
other states interested in populations belonging to ‘their’ state people. In Syria
and the other states of the Levant, however, the relationship between the new
states and their (new) minorities was mediated by a third factor: imperial
occupation. Rather than being recognised as a fully independent nation-state
by the League, Syria was provisionally recognised as independent and placed
under the mandatory tutelage of France. But although state development in
mandate-era Syria was, without doubt, animated and ordered by the imperial
power, it is harder to ascribe the norms this process followed to French impe-
rialism alone. States inside and outside Europe adopted them in the modern
period, whether imperial powers or not, and to a great extent the ‘national’
practices and institutions that shaped state development in mandate Syria were
continuations of Ottoman trends.

Within this context, the chapter discusses the place of the concept of
‘minority’ in the relationship between France and Syria. Doing this with a
critical understanding of the concept and its historicity allows us to refine
earlier analyses of French policy in Syria as one of ‘divide-and-rule’ based on
using ‘minorities’ to offset the ‘majority’. The concept came into common use
in both French and Syrian writings later than one might think, and was used
not only as a justification for French domination in Syria (on the grounds of
‘protection of minorities’), but as a means for certain groups in Syrian society
to advance their own interests relative to the mandatory authorities, the Syrian
state and society at large. The discussion of the concept of ‘minority’ is placed
in a wider analysis of the French imperialist vision of Syrian society which
shows how that vision affected French policy in Syria, and how French policy,
in turn, affected Syrian society. This casts light on the contradictions created
by French attempts to order Syrian society along religious lines within the
secular state form of the nation-state.

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 45

Examining this question also offers us a way of assessing the continuities
and discontinuities between the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods in Syria.
The communities that emerged as ‘minorities’ during the mandate cannot
simply be mapped back onto the millets or Christian and Jewish communi-
ties of the Ottoman period. A minority is a modern phenomenon, a millet
pre-modern, though by 1914 the Ottoman millets were already marked by the
effects of the transformation of the state. Even those religious communities
that did previously exist as millets saw their relationship to the state and the
wider society alter significantly as they became minorities in the new Syrian
nation-state; other minorities, with no prior history as millets, also emerged.
In many cases neither the Syrian minorities nor the French understood the sig-
nificance of the transformation that had occurred - unsurprisingly, since it was
a slow, uneven, and difficult process that had begun long before. Frequently,
Syrians recognised the import of their changed circumstances before their
French rulers did.

Divide and Rule: But on what Grounds?

Many sound historical works have demonstrated that French officials
approached Syria with a communitarian understanding of Syrian society, and
on this basis adopted a divisive communitarian politics. Philip Khoury’s classic
political history of the mandate offers numerous examples in the framework of
a general argument about the shape of mandatory politics, as do earlier works
by Albert Hourani and Stephen Fongrigg . 3 An influential article by Edmund
Burke relates this aspect of French policy in Syria to imperial experiences else-
where, showing that it fitted into the ‘associationist’ model of imperial rule
developed in Morocco, where the French emphasised - and institutionalised
- the division between Arabs and Berbers . 4

Other works have shown how the dynamic functioned either with regard
to specific events or specific communities. Communitarian patterns of recruit-
ment into the local armed forces, for example, have been widely discussed, as
have their effect on politics in independent Syria. Philip Khoury outlines the
pattern; other scholars have nuanced the picture, like Nacklie Bou-Nacklie,
or discussed recruitment from specific groups or into specific formations, as
in Jean-David Mizrahi’s account of the formation of the ‘Circassian squad-
rons ’. 5 (The policy pre-dated the mandate, indeed, with French recruitment of
an initially mostly Armenian Legion d’Orient to fight against the Ottomans
during the First World War. 6 ) Patrick Seale discusses the participation of
‘Alawis in the armed forces of the mandate in his account of the rural ‘Alawi
background of Hafiz al-Asad - an account which certainly takes ‘minorities’
to be the basis of French policy . 7 The effects of this pattern of recruitment
on independent Syria have also been noted elsewhere: tellingly, Khoury closes
his account of the mandate by discussing it, while Eyal Zisser’s discussion of

4 6 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

the ‘Alawis’ passage ‘from ethnic minority to ruling sect’ also draws the link. 8
The use of irregular troops from Armenian, Circassian and other communi-
ties in the repression of the ‘Great Revolt’ of 1925-7 is also well-known. 9 It
is against the contemporary French interpretation of the revolt as a sectarian
outburst instigated by feudal notables that Michael Provence argues that the
uprising brought together different communities and different socioeconomic
classes - that it was, in a sense, the crucible in which a Syrian nation was
forged. 10

Communitarianism did not only mark French military policy. The admin-
istrative division of Syria along communal lines is discussed in the general
histories of the mandate; the so-called ‘compact minorities’ and the statelets
attributed to them by the French have also been the specific subject of schol-
arly studies. 11 France’s relations with Syria’s refugee communities have been
studied, too, 12 and with the Kurds - a community including recently arrived
refugees and long-established residents. 13 French policy ‘ethnicised’ groups
whose boundaries and communal identity had not previously been clear. 14
This understanding of Syrian society as primordially divided was materialised
in the form of countless postcards and photographs of communal ‘types’, often
playing out typical ‘scenes’. 15

My aim here is not to dispute the well-supported position that French
policy had a communitarian basis, but rather to nuance the argument that
France’s policy of ‘divide and rule’ was based on cultivating close links with
minority groups in order to offset the opposition of the majority - the terms
that are commonly used in this literature. 16 Although not entirely inaccu-
rate, this interpretation is unsatisfactory. It assumes that at the start of the
mandate there was a coherent majority in Syria from which other groups can
be easily distinguished as minorities - an unsafe assumption, since these con-
cepts became meaningful in Syria only in the mandate period, and then only
gradually. This interpretation also implies that minorities as such figured in
the French imperialist vision of Syrian society. But if they were present at all,
‘minorities’ played a limited part in French rhetoric about Syrian society at
the outset of the mandate. Sketching out the future organisation of Syria just
before the French occupation of Damascus in 1920, the senior official, Robert
de Caix, certainly used the term: in a long document proposing multiple divi-
sions for the mandate territories, he called the ‘protection of minorities’ a
‘primordial task of the mandatory Powers’. But this was in the final section,
after a detailed survey of the areas claimed by France (and the many divisions
within their population) in which the word appears little. 17 For the most part,
in the early years of the mandate French writers focused on sectarian divisions
in Syria without necessarily attaching the term ‘minority’ to them. Writing in
1929, Beauplan began his chapter on the division of Syria by referring specifi-
cally to de Caix and his ‘great idea’ of 1920 ‘which today still dominates our
whole policy in the Levant’ - but he proceeded to describe that policy without

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate

l 47

using the word ‘minority’ once. 18 This indicates the weak hold of the concept
at that time. It spread gradually in both French and Syrian usage as the 1920s
and 1930s progressed. By the mid-1950s it was common in both French and
Syrian writings about Syria - but it was not applied in the same way to all
communities that were numerical minorities.

Simply seeing French policy as one of manipulating or instrumentalising
minorities carries other risks. First, it tends to assume the power and agency
of the coloniser while overlooking the agency of the colonised - with the pos-
sible exception of the nationalists who opposed France. In fact, even individual
members of ‘minority’ communities who were strongly pro-French were far
from being passive tools of imperialism: they were agents who made their own
choices, and were quite capable of putting pressure on France to advance their
own interests. Second, it overlooks the diversity of responses to the French
presence between and within particular ‘minorities’: in every community -
the ‘majority’ as well as the ‘minorities’ - there was a range of responses to
French imperialism. And third, it ignores the significant differences in the way
the French treated different ‘minorities’: significant both in the sense that they
were large, and that they reveal much about the imperial understanding of
Syrian society. As we will see, in their effort to divide and rule, French officials
in Syria gave most weight to religious divisions. Although they did exploit
Syria’s ethnolinguistic divisions, it was in a less extensive, less formalised way.
The gradual and incomplete change from a sectarian to a minoritarian under-
standing of Syrian society - in both French and Syrian sources - reflects the
transformation of that society. By analysing the French imperial understanding
of Syrian society on which this policy of divide and rule was based, I hope to
offer a more nuanced account of how it functioned. My analysis starts with
a brief account of the contemporary European understanding of the Ottoman
millet system, in which the French understanding of post-Ottoman Syrian
society was rooted.

European Understandings of the Ottoman Millet System

According to the classical European understanding of the millet system, the
non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire were divided up according
to their religion: Greek Orthodox Christian, Armenian Christian and Jewish.
Each of these communities was given political autonomy, under the author-
ity of the Patriarch in the first two cases and the Chief Rabbi in the last. The
head of each community was a senior official of the Ottoman administration
resident in Constantinople; the first holders of these posts had been appointed
by Mehmet the Conqueror immediately after the city fell to him in 1453. The
millets were discrete units, administered by their respective religious hierar-
chies through which they interacted with the state, for example, by paying
tax; each had its own legal system for personal status law. There was little

48 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

interaction between the non-Muslim millets, or between them and the Muslim
population.

This understanding of the system has been extensively revised in the last
thirty years . 19 It is too dependent on the view from Constantinople: it assumes
that the formal legal relationship of the millets in Constantinople was reflected
throughout the empire. Moreover, it anachronistically projects the state of
affairs existing at the apogee, and under the influence, of European expan-
sion in the empire back into the Ottoman past. Thus, it presents the ‘system’
as being more systematic than it in fact was. The formal relationship between
the non-Muslim peoples of the empire and the state varied considerably from
place to place and over time, rather than being set in stone from 1453; the
very concept of the millet as a specific community of non-Muslim Ottoman
subjects developed much later than that . 20 If the Ottoman authorities even in
the empire’s heyday were unable to impose central control over the population
(assuming that such a thing was even considered desirable then), it is unlikely
that the Patriarch’s authority over the Greek Orthodox of Homs, say, was
especially effective. His spiritual authority might be acknowledged, but in tem-
poral matters diversity was the rule. The Jewish community of Salonica - the
largest in the empire - consistently rejected the authority of the chief rabbi in
Istanbul . 21 The clergy’s role in actual administration of the community was
probably smaller than was once thought. Within the non-Muslim communi-
ties, religious subdivisions gradually came to be recognised by the establish-
ment of new millets, for example, the Armenian Protestant millet recognised
by the Sultan in 1850 under British pressure. There were fourteen officially
recognised millets by 1914, while several religious communities that were
(broadly speaking) Muslim but were distant from the Ottoman state’s official
interpretation of Sunni Islam - notably, for our purposes, the Druzes and
‘Alawis of the Levant - behaved as unofficial millets, a term I explain below.

The danger of describing Ottoman society in terms of the millet system is
that, by assuming a systematic organisation of state-society relations, we may
overlook the ad hoc and constantly developing nature of those relations, espe-
cially at the local level away from Constantinople. It is better to acknowledge
that the millet system was not systematic: it constantly adapted to meet new
circumstances. The complicated reality of interaction between the religious
communities of the empire, and between individual non-Muslims and the
state, is obscured by the assumption that it was extremely limited. Likewise,
the diversity of the empire’s populations, both Muslim and non-Muslim, is
obscured by the assumption that only religious divisions mattered, when even
within the main religious groupings there were many more cleavages, both
religious and ethnolinguistic. In the transformation of the Ottoman communi-
ties, ethnolinguistic divisions gained a primacy they had never had under the
millet system.

Although by the nineteenth century European perceptions of Ottoman

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 49

society were influencing how that society perceived itself, the millet ideal was
not merely a creation of European scholarship: the millets themselves traced
their lineage back to the conquest of Constantinople . 22 This reflects an histori-
cal irony. Under the ideal of the millet system, religion was the main marker
of identity, religious law was paramount and religious hierarchies wielded
temporal authority over the non-Muslim communities on behalf of the Sultan.
These three phenomena had probably never been as prevalent in practice as
in theory - but the ideal crystallised at exactly the point when they began to
wane definitively, in favour of ethnic/national identities, secular law and the
secularisation of political authority within the millets.

For the purposes of this book, however, the most important thing to bear
in mind about the classical ideal of the millet system as outlined above is that
this was the understanding that French officials under the mandate brought to
Syrian society: they believed that it was a society already divided along reli-
gious lines into numerous mutually suspicious and insular communities, and
that religious identities trumped all other kinds - a tenacious misconception
about the Middle East. ‘Each community is a little people, jealous of its per-
sonality, which has its chief, national and religious at the same time; they are
so many nations, and in effect they carry that name .’ 23 Therefore, the political
divisions they sought to impose followed religious lines - divisions that applied
both to the territory and to the population under mandate. In categorising the
population by religion in censuses the French authorities followed Ottoman
precedent; the same could be argued for the use of religious communal law
to divide the population, although the French extended official recognition
in this way to communities that had previously lacked it. Fikewise, while the
administrative division of the mandate territories along religious lines had
some precedent in the late Ottoman era - namely, the special administrative
status granted to the miitesarrifiye of Mount Febanon in the 1860s - it went
far beyond that precedent. Syrian society reacted to these administrative and
judicial divisions in unpredictable ways.

A Religious Ordering of Society within a Secular Nation-state Form

The emergence of minorities in Syria took place within the framework of a new
nation-state form created by the Allied powers after the First World War. This
state and France’s role in it both derived legally from Article 22 of the Teague
of Nations Covenant, which enshrined the principle of ‘mandates’. Clause 4
states that:

Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage
of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally
recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a
Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone . 24

50 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Simultaneously, therefore, the mandate both justified French occupation and
legitimated Syrian nationalism - which, developing from pre-war Arabism,
was already a rising force.

James Gelvin has shown how the emir Faysal’s short-lived regime attempted
to mobilise the population using a nationalism defined from above, while a
popular nationalism with rather different priorities emerged in Syria’s larger
cities . 25 This national feeling was not universal: it should not, for example, be
taken as expressing the will of a coherent majority. (Later chapters will elabo-
rate on this point.) It was sufficiently dynamic, however, to represent the main
challenge to French rule. Colonial rule provided a rallying point for national-
ism even as colonial policies undermined it, and the nation-state form in itself
encouraged nationalism even if Syrian nationalism felt cramped by the borders
imposed in the post-war peace settlement. Within those borders, the emergence
of minorities (as opposed to millets) was inevitable. Even without the Sykes-
Picot agreement and the mandate, a Syrian nation-state of some form would
still have appeared, with its own borders, nationalism and ‘minorities’, to seek
recognition by the League of Nations - as the example of the Turkish Republic
suggests.

Despite this new, explicitly national framework of the Syrian state, the
French attempted to reinforce religious divisions: particularly, by distribut-
ing seats to representative bodies on religious communal grounds; extending
legal autonomy in matters of personal status to communities which had not
previously been autonomous; and granting territorial autonomy to certain reli-
giously defined groups. That is, by extending what remained of the Ottoman
millet system - as they understood it. This policy adhered to the colonial
theories of Marshal Lyautey, whose principle of association as opposed to
assimilation had been developed in Morocco . 26 Rather than attempting to
assimilate Syrian society to French norms, the mandatory authorities would
rule by association with that society, through native governments and laws.
Ottoman legal reforms since the mid-nineteenth century had reduced legal
distinctions between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, but in the important
area of personal status law religious distinctions still obtained . 27 The continued
competence of communal religious courts in this area was ensured by Article 6
of the mandate charter, including the line: ‘Respect for the personal status of
the various peoples and their religious interests shall be fully guaranteed.’ On
this basis, personal status law was crucial to French efforts to divide Syria’s
communities religiously.

Examples are numerous. Before the mandate even officially began, the
Fligh Commission established separate ‘Alawi religious courts on the author-
ity of a judgement from an amenable Muslim legal scholar that the ‘Alawis
were not heretical Muslims but a distinct religious community . 28 A later Fligh
Commissioner, Damien de Martel, issued a decree on religious law - Arrete no.
60/L.R., of 13 March 1936 - requiring the communities to submit their own

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 51

communal statute for governmental approval, based on their religious texts
and traditions. This remained in abeyance due to Sunni Muslim opposition,
but French efforts to formalise the position of religious communities continued
- even when the community was so small it had no religious authorities
competent to draw up its own communal law, as with the Isma'ilis. 29

What were the reasons for this policy of extending, not reducing, the
religious divisions of Ottoman law? It derived from the French authorities’
religious understanding of Syrian society, itself influenced by France’s histori-
cal links with the Christian communities. Maintaining these communities as
client groups - above all, justifying the separation from the rest of the mandate
territories of a Lebanese state dominated by Maronite Christians - required
a system of political organisation which kept them distinct from the rest of
the population. Since the main Christian communities were Arabic-speakers,
that meant choosing a religiously-ordered organisation. The active contribu-
tion of some Syrian Christians influenced this choice. It should be stressed,
however, that this policy could be perfectly effective without any reference
to the concept of ‘minority’: it found its justification in religious differences,
not number. (In Lebanon, indeed, a similar policy of religious division was
effectively put into place, with the active cooperation of some Lebanese, but
without anything resembling a ‘majority’.) Later, the concepts of majority and
minority would be bolted on to those different religious groups by both French
and Syrian observers. But they were not there at the outset.

When the French tried to order Syrian society along religious lines,
however, the various Syrian communities - religious or other - did not react as
planned. Their reactions were conditioned, in a way that French actors often
failed to understand, by the transition to a nation-state form. The next part
of the chapter considers these communities, grouped into three main catego-
ries: non-arabophone Sunni Muslim communities; Arabic-speakers belonging
to (broadly) Muslim, but not Sunni, religious communities; and arabophone
Christians. 30 References to nationalist sources give ‘minorities’ the necessary
context of a ‘majority’, showing how a majority in formation both reacted to
and acted on the formation of minorities.

Within a Syrian Arab nation-state, Syria’s Sunni Muslim community split
along ethnolinguistic lines. 31 The various strands of Syrian Arab nationalism
were most strongly rooted in, and addressed themselves most directly to, the
Sunni Muslim Arabs who dominated Syria’s cities and towns: the national
‘majority’ (though while nationalists may have taken this majority for granted,
historians should not: Sunni Muslim Arabs were not an overwhelming major-
ity in the mandate territories as a whole, 32 while the term ‘majority’ itself
glosses over important divisions). Despite the French conception of religion
as the main marker of identity, it was probably easier for arabophone reli-
gious minorities to join that ‘majority’ than it was for non-arabophone Sunni

52 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Muslim groups: Circassians, Kurds and Turks. In an editorial written early in
the mandate period, the (Christian) newspaper editor Yusuf al-‘Issa proposed
the adoption of the Prophet’s birthday - ‘the Arab Prophet’s birthday’ 33 - as
a national holiday which would rally the entire nation: that is, ‘all the arabo-
phone communities [kidl al-tawd’if al-ndtiqa bil-dad ]’. 34 Moreover, Syria
should follow republican Turkey’s example by inculcating a national identity
through state education - and Syria faced fewer barriers to unity, because ‘our
country contains only one, Arab, stock’.

Al-'Issa’s vision of a nation united by the Arabic language was no doubt
partly intended to counter the insistent French claim that religious divisions
in Syrian society were irremediable; it shows that majorities are open to mul-
tiple definitions. Like any definition of a majority, however, this one creates
its own minorities: to find a national identity capable of overcoming religious
divisions, al-Tssa adopted an ethnolinguistic definition of nationality that
excluded non-Arabic-speakers - indeed, denied their existence on Syrian soil.
But such communities did exist. The new nation-state form had created the
conditions for them to become ‘minorities’, a transformation wrought partly
by the decision of individuals within those communities to employ a language
of ‘minorities’ in advancing their own political interests. Within the nation-
state, such communities had to negotiate their relationship with the national
majority, even if the identity of that majority remained vague. One factor
governing this relationship was the extent to which minorities were identified
with external actors, starting with the League of Nations - a reference point
for anyone wishing his or her community to be defined as a ‘minority’. To the
larger Sunni Muslim ethnolinguistic minorities, other external actors probably
mattered more: for the Kurds, the Kurdish minorities of neighbouring states;
for the Turkish-speakers of Alexandretta, the Turkish Republic. This situation
is comparable with that of minorities (officially recognised or not) in central
and eastern Europe at that time. Things were different for the small and dis-
persed Circassian community, which was not identified with a neighbouring
state or with neighbouring populations. Rather, like Syria’s Christian commu-
nities it was often identified with the French Fligh Commission; for example,
because of the latter’s heavy recruitment of Circassians into its armed forces,
and the willingness of Circassians to be recruited.

Some members of these ethnolinguistic communities made full use of the
repertoire of political action opened to them by the growing weight of the
concept of ‘minority’ in international public discourse - not least at the League,
since the mandate was a constant reference point for the French authorities.
Understanding their changed position, within a decade of the French occupa-
tion they were pushing for political representation and international guaran-
tees of their rights as national minorities analogous to those of central and
eastern Europe. But ‘the Fligh Commission has always refused to consent to
the organisation of a Kurdish minority as elsewhere to the organisation of

‘ Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 53

any other ethnic minority ’. 35 Some Circassians had requested the recognition
of their political rights as a ‘minority’ by 1928, if not earlier . 36 Such demands
troubled the French, who were unwilling to acknowledge ethnolinguistic
minorities within the religious majority. One of the High Commissioner’s del-
egates clarified the French position:

Under the name ‘communities’ are generally designated groupings of individuals
of the same religion and the same rite . . . This definition of communities evidently
excludes any other grouping whose individuals are united by links other than
confessional links (community of religion and of rite).

The Tcherkess [Circassians] are of Sunni Muslim religion (Hanafite rite) and
cannot, from the confessional point of view, form a distinct community . 37

If international law gave them this status and they had specific common
interests to defend, he wrote, the Circassians might be considered an ‘ethnic
minority’ - but he preferred to adopt, ‘in the political order’, a religious clas-
sification, as ‘resolving without difficulty the problem of representation of the
minorities or the distribution of seats in the representative assemblies’.

Such a religious distribution of political power - with a guaranteed propor-
tion of representation reserved for religious minorities - favoured France’s
Christian clients: this, along with a two-stage electoral system and judicious
intimidation, made it easier (though not always easy) to turn supposedly
representative institutions into instruments of French domination. Allowing
Circassian representation as an ethnic minority, however, would invalidate
that religious distribution of power. Syrian identities were in flux at this time,
and many French and Christian writers asserted or assumed that religious
boundaries implied ethnic, even ‘racial’, boundaries - stating, for example,
that the administrative division of Syria had been ‘imposed ... by the popula-
tions concerned, who are separated by rivalries of race as well as their religious
beliefs ’. 38 But such assertions were made to reinforce the religious division of
society, not for their own sake. An ethnolinguistic division of society would
subsume the mainly Arabic-speaking Christians within a group dominated
by Sunni Muslim Arabs, the community perceived by the French - with
much generalisation - as being the most ‘nationalist’. This would imperil the
religious conception of Syrian society that justified both the French presence
and the separate status of Lebanon, where France’s interests and clients were
concentrated. When Kurds requested autonomy for the regions they inhabited,
the threat was greater: as a much larger, more concentrated community than
the Circassians, their claim to a state menaced not only the religious order
France had imposed, but also Syrian Arab nationalism and the nationalisms
of neighbouring states. Turkey, especially, put constant pressure on the High
Commissioner to ensure that no such autonomy be granted . 39

Of course, the French reluctance to recognise ethnolinguistic minorities

54 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

officially did not preclude the exploitation of ethnolinguistic divisions, for
example by recruiting Circassian squadrons into the Troupes du Levant. 40
This policy, which extended also to Armenians from the refugee community,
had a (deliberately) damaging effect on communal relations. In Ulfat al-Idilbi’s
semi-autobiographical novel, Dimashq ya basmat al-huzn, such recruits are
described as ‘mercenaries, who had lived by the goodness of this nation then
turned against its people and joined the enemy’. 41 The character narrating these
words, like the author, belongs to the Damascene Sunni Muslim elite that pro-
vided Syrian Arab nationalism with many of its leading figures, and arguably
its most responsive audience.

The Arabic-speaking, Muslim, but non-Sunni communities of Syria - notably
the Druzes and the ‘Alawis - were in a rather different situation. They had
never been officially recognised as millets, since the Ottoman Empire did not
recognise divisions within Islam. But, living in areas relatively remote from
the urban centres of political life in Syria, they were accustomed to running
their own affairs, subject to fluctuating levels of state interference. 42 They can
therefore be regarded as ‘unofficial’ millets: religiously demarcated communi-
ties exercising a large measure of autonomy, sometimes with official tolera-
tion. 43 These groups are often described as ‘compact minorities’ because their
geographical concentration enabled the French to set them apart in statelets of
their own. 44 Because this was done on religious lines, it reinforced the religious
conception of Syrian society rather than undermining it. But calling these com-
munities ‘minorities’ prior to Syria’s independence is problematic: the term
does not fully explain their relationship with either the French authorities or
Syrian Arab nationalism.

At the time of the 1936 treaty negotiations the Fligh Commission received,
and forwarded to Paris and the League of Nations, numerous telegrams and
statements from inhabitants of the ‘Alawi statelet both for and against its
being placed under the authority of Damascus. Petitions arguing against the
region’s incorporation into Syria generally did not use the language of minori-
ties, instead simply requesting autonomy - sometimes as a community, often
without specifying. 45 One of the rare petitions that did use the term ‘minor-
ity’ came from ‘Alawi and Christian members of the region’s representative
council. It stated that:

the populations of this government belong to different Communities, each one
having its beliefs, traditions, and distinct customs. Relative to Syria as a whole, they
constitute minorities that cannot and do not wish to be incorporated into Syrian
Unity in any way . 46

They did not consider themselves to be minorities: they were trying to avoid
becoming minorities by their incorporation into a larger Syrian state.

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate

[55

This is in marked contrast with the Christian communities, who, as we
shall see below, had wholeheartedly adopted the language of minorities by
this time. The difference, I think, lies in the geography. The millet system had
never had territorial implications and for the Christian communities of Syria
(Lebanon apart) it never would. But the Druzes and the ‘Alawis, while con-
sidering themselves as separate communities for religious reasons, like millets,
were also attached to territorial units. Their geographical concentration had
obtained for them separate statelets: an institutional framework within which
they could mobilise as a majority, with no more reason to consider themselves
a ‘minority’ than Scots in Scotland. The Syrian judge and politician, Yusuf
al-Hakim, who came from the ‘Alawi region and was involved in attempts
to re-incorporate it into Syria, frequently refers to the ‘Alawis as a majority,
akthariyya, in his memoirs . 47 The French, preoccupied with the Christians,
might consider Muslim but non-Sunni communities as distinct groups (that is,
as millets; hence, the ‘officialisation’ of ‘Alawi, Isma'ili or Druze communal
law), or recruit them disproportionately into the army , 48 but they rarely con-
sidered them as ‘minorities’. Nationalist Druzes and ‘Alawis, meanwhile, con-
sidered themselves to be not minorities but part of the Syrian Arab majority.

Thus, whether they were motivated by a desire to maintain majority status
in an autonomous state (albeit aware of the prospect of becoming a minor-
ity in a unified Syria), or asserting membership of a wider national majority,
simply describing these communities as minorities is unsatisfactory. It does not
explain why individuals belonging to these communities acted as they did, and
occludes diverse political opinions within them. It also risks reading history
backwards, implying either that a Syrian nation-state with a coherent major-
ity already existed at the beginning of the mandate or that the incorporation
of these communities into a Syrian nation-state as minorities was inevitable.
The process of state formation that fixed them, as minorities, within a Syrian
nation-state was taking place during the mandate, despite the French attempts
to separate them. But it was not complete . 49 The fact that in the mandate
period they are rarely identified as minorities, either by themselves or by the
French, reflects this.

Some communities, though, did have members who described themselves as
minorities, and were wholeheartedly claimed as such - unlike the Kurds or
Circassians - by the French: the Christian communities which had already
had communal legal status as millets in the Ottoman period . 50 Although this
chapter contends that minorities are not the same as millets, French officials
were most comfortable when that equivalence could be made. So were many
Syrian Christians, especially clergymen, who accepted the continuation and
rigidification of the millet system. Indeed, they acted perhaps more than ever
before according to the ideal of the system: the clergy provided almost the only
political leadership of these communities to leave a trace in the French archival

5 6 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

sources I have read. This may reveal more about the High Commission’s pref-
erences when selecting privileged interlocutors (or which correspondence they
took seriously enough to keep) than about the realities of political organisation
among Syria’s Christians, but it is obvious enough that the French preferred to
use religion to structure their relationship with these communities. This also
permitted them, and their Christian allies, to marginalise the (many) Christians
who were not hostile to nationalism. 51

This policy suited the historic justification for French involvement in the
Ottoman Empire, the protection of the Christian communities; but it sat
uneasily with the secular nation-state form and the philosophy of League of
Nations. In line with that philosophy, the French, therefore, gradually came
to recast both their present purpose and their past involvement in Syria as
being the protection of ‘minorities’. Pro-French Christians did the same. The
concept was in any case becoming increasingly meaningful in Syria, as various
institutions of the nation-state took deeper root; now - and only now - it also
became an important part of the self- justifying rhetoric of French imperialism.
This development was related to the growing pressure on France to put an end
to the mandate and sign a treaty granting Syrian independence, especially after
Britain had done just this in Iraq. The new nation-states of Europe had had to
sign minorities treaties with the League as a condition of their independence:
these offered a legal precedent for minorities clauses to be inserted into any
treaty with Syria, as a means by which France might retain its right to interfere
in Syrian affairs. 52 Unsurprisingly, the ‘minorities question’ became a crucial
and sticky one in successive rounds of treaty negotiations in the 1930s. But
behind this terminological shift lay the same preoccupation with Christians:
whether it is used by pro-French Syrians, French officials or Syrian national-
ists, ‘minorities’ is frequently a synonym for ‘Christian [and sometimes Jewish]
communities’.

Thus, Christian clergymen such as Monsignor Ignace Nouri wrote to the
High Commissioner, Damien de Martel, to demand continued French protec-
tion of the minorities, ‘that is to say, the Christians and Jews’. 53 His letter
also gives an extremely partial account of the treatment of Syria’s (Christian)
‘minorities’ in history: it is not only modern scholars who project this modern
category into the past. Martel’s comment to the New York Times, meanwhile,
that France was in Syria to protect the country’s ‘Christian elements’ elicited
protests from Christian nationalists in Aleppo. 54

The Persistence of ‘Millet’ Identities?

The controversy about minorities during the 1930s, especially during the 1936
treaty negotiations, raises an intriguing point about the seeming persistence of
millet identities in post-Ottoman Syria: that nationalists were just as keen as
the French to restrict the term ‘minority’ to former (non-Muslim) millets. Why?

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 57

Externally guaranteed ‘protection’ for minorities was no more welcome to
Syrian nationalists than to the governments of the new states of Europe, whose
recognition by the League was conditional on their signing minorities trea-
ties. 55 It represented an infringement of national sovereignty, and in the Syrian
case an obvious excuse for permanent French interference. In a 1932 editorial
discussing the pretexts for British and French involvement in the Middle East,
Najib al-Rayyis summed it up in a few words: ‘As for Syria, always minori-
ties’. 56 But if that word might grudgingly be applied to Christians, al-Rayyis
had no wish to see its uses extended: this article sets out to rebut the claim,
published in La Syrie, that France had responsibilities towards a Shi'ite ‘minor-
ity’ in Lebanon. Al-Rayyis points out that ‘“minorities” had been known as a
term for Christians only’ and denies that the ‘Muslim Arab Shi'a’ constitute a
minority. 57

There are several possible reasons for this. The first is the most obvious:
that the division of society along religious lines into Muslims (all Muslims), on
the one hand, and non-Muslim millets, on the other, was not merely an impe-
rialist construct but had resonance for Syrian writers. We can say this without
reproducing French imperialist rhetoric, especially if we take into account the
ways in which the nation-state form had altered the relationship between reli-
gious groups and the state (something that may not have been clear to contem-
porary actors). For nationalists as much as for pro-French figures like Nouri,
the millet system was a well-established framework within which Syrians could
understand their own society - especially when it was taken for granted that
that society was an Arab national community.

A second reason has less to do with established structures of thought,
and more to do with current political concerns. Admitting the existence of
minorities other than the Christian and Jewish communities would have posed
difficult new problems to Syrian Arab nationalism - raising the possibility,
for example, of Turkish-speakers in the Sanjak of Alexandretta demanding
League-backed treaty guarantees with Ankara’s support. Extending the term
‘minority’ to communities other than the former millets was not in the nation-
alists’ interests. Earlier I cited a letter in which a French official mentioned
the High Commission’s refusal to recognise ethnic (that is, non-religious)
minorities; the same letter adds that

This is also the opinion expressed by Damascene nationalist circles, which intend to
hold to respecting the rights already acquired by confessional minorities only. The
Kurds being Muslims like the Tcherkesses must in this regard be assimilated to the
Syrians [sic] of the same religion . 58

Interestingly, Sunni Muslims (and not only active nationalists) also continued
the old assumption that non-Sunni Muslim groups had no right to recogni-
tion as separate communal entities - as we saw in the extract from al-Rayyis

58 j

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

with respect to the Shi'a. While this can be understood within the ‘traditional’
framework of the millet system, as a refusal to admit religious divisions within
Islam, among nationalists it can also be understood as a convenient means
of delegitimising the territorial separation of the Druze and ‘Alawi statelets
within the new framework of the nation-state. 59

On the French side, meanwhile, the preference for keeping to a ‘millet’
understanding of Syrian society has already been explored in some detail
above. With regard to the specific question of minorities in the treaty nego-
tiations, we might add that it would suit French interests quite well to retain
a right of intervention on behalf of Syrian Christians - a small community,
lacking any major external backing from other sources, and with a strong pro-
French element. It would be rather less in French interests to take on an obli-
gation to protect, for example, a Kurdish ‘minority’ whose loyalty to France
was far shakier, and whose existence as part of a far larger Kurdish population
spreading across regional borders (and far beyond French influence) raised
the possibility of France being drawn into conflict not only with an independ-
ent Syrian government but with neighbouring states. This did not stop Kurds
demanding communal recognition, of course.

The question remains as to why the Christian hierarchies, too, continued to
act as millets, despite having adopted a new term - ‘minorities’ - which fitted the
times and qualified them for international protection. The following suggestions
are speculative, but I hope plausible. First, as well as legitimating France’s pres-
ence in the Levant the religious conception of society strengthened the Christian
communities as privileged clients of France, in the eyes of some Christians at
least. This would also explain why some Christians might prefer that ethnolin-
guistic minorities were not recognised as such: it would dilute their own claim
to special status. Second, the political significance of the religious hierarchies
would likely dwindle in a national (as opposed to religious) state. Many clergy-
men disliked the transition to secular authority within their communities. This
process had begun long before, as had their opposition to it: Niyazi Berkes notes
that ‘the religious leaders of the millets were the most strongly opposed to the
secularizing provisions of the [1856 Ottoman] Reform Edict’. 60 The French will-
ingness to accept the clergy as the chief legitimate authority within the Christian
communities provided an opportunity to arrest the process.

Not all Christians, not even all clergymen, were hostile to nationalism: the
Greek Orthodox, especially, seem to have asserted their place within a Syrian
Arab nation. 61 (Perhaps because of this, mandate officials often called them
‘cousins of Islam’. 62 ) At the height of the minorities controversy, in 1936,
a senior French official in Damascus complained that the Greek Orthodox
Patriarch Alexandros III Tahan had visited nationalist leaders and ‘allowed
himself to say that he “didn’t understand all the noise being made over the
question of minorities; we’re all Arabs and we don’t need any special protec-
tion except that of the common laws in an Arab country”.’ 63 But Tahan was

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate

[59

untypical. Many Christian clergymen held onto a religious political order
that preserved their own influence, adopting the new term ‘minority’ for that
purpose - at the risk of excluding their communities from the majority in
formation.

For Christian nationalists like Yusuf al-‘Issa, it thus became necessary to tran-
scend millet identities: to insist - to other Christians, to the French, but especially
to the wider nationalist movement - that the religious difference did not affect
the status of Christians as members of the national community: that they were
not, in any politically meaningful sense, a ‘minority’. It was not always an easy
task, and it was made harder by the cooperation between some other Christians
and the French authorities, which reinforced the sense among many Muslim
nationalists that Christians were not fully part of the national community.

As we can see, then, it was not only due to simple inertia or the persistence
of primordial religious categories that aspects of the millet system remained
operative underneath the new terminology of minorities. But the seeming
continuity of an older order can mask the current political concerns of those
involved; it can also make us forget - as many actors at the time perhaps
forgot - that the situation of a minority in a nation-state is riskier than that
of a millet. The Ottoman millets had a recognised and accepted place in
the Ottoman polity. In the post-Ottoman nation-states of the Middle East,
minorities, religious or otherwise, risked a greater degree of exclusion. 64

High Commissioner Damien de Martel understood that risk. In July 1937
he related to Paris his recent meeting with the apostolic delegate, Monsignor
Lepretre, and the Syrian-Catholic Monsignor Tappouni. They had discussed
the relatively light-handed protection of minorities guaranteed by the 1936
treaty:

these intelligent prelates willingly recognize that the disappearance of the Ottoman
Empire has put the question of minorities onto quite new bases. Within an empire
composed of heterogeneous nationalities, the Christian communities were able to
constitute themselves as ‘nations’ and benefit from a foreign protection the prin-
ciple of which was not contested. But on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire states
with a national basis have created themselves, whose patriotism risks being all the
stormier for being younger . . . The traditional mission of protector of minorities
[sic] that France has assumed for centuries has become, because of this fact, much
more complex. By protecting them too assertively or too strictly, or by seeming to
take their presence as a pretext for hindering the development of national sentiment,
France would have risked making its proteges into foreign bodies condemned to
exodus or massacre on the day when international complications prevented her from
defending the threatened minorities effectively . 65

But even Martel still refers only to religious minorities, despite understanding
the ‘national’ root of the problem. He also lets France off too lightly: although

6 o J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

French humanitarian concern for the minorities was genuine - the refugee
communities were a worrying reminder of the fate of national minorities in
an era of nation-states 66 - it was inextricably linked with the furthering of
French imperial aims. The French had already placed the minorities at risk,
not by ‘protecting them too assertively’ but by using them as a justification for
occupation and exploiting them as a political (and military) tool against the
formation of an inclusive national community in Syria.

Conclusion

In Chapter 1, I argued that the concept of ‘minority’ came into widespread
usage when it did, after First World War, because it was only in this period
that objective conditions made the term meaningful: the term did not exist
earlier because ‘minorities’ did not exist, though the cultural identities by
which majorities and minorities would later be defined in some form did.
While some of those conditions were falling into place in the late Ottoman
period, it was only during the mandate, in the context of a Syrian nation-state,
that the term ‘minority’ was adopted by Syrians and others to describe groups
within Syrian society. The ‘minorities question’ became relevant in Syria at the
same time as it did in European states.

It would be an over-statement, though, to say that minorities sprang into
existence in 1918, when a Syrian state independent of the Ottoman Empire
was established, or 1922, when a Syrian state under French mandate was
recognised by the League of Nations. Underlying the quite sudden change in
the formal structure of the state in Syria were slower, deeper processes of state
formation that had begun in the Ottoman period but continued in the mandate
period. By examining here the ways in which the concept of ‘minority’ was
explicitly employed in the mandate period I have tried to give an understand-
ing of some of the changes wrought by the imposition of a new state-form, but
also of some of the continuities from earlier times. In a nation-state based on
an identity which included the component of the Arabic language, ethnolin-
guistic divisions - already becoming more salient in the later Ottoman period
- gained an added edge. But as we have also seen, that did not necessarily mean
that religious divisions became less salient: in some senses, French, Syrian
nationalist and pro-French Syrian writers all had an interest in concentrating
on religious differences as a means of excluding ethnolinguistic questions from
the debate about minorities.

One thing that emerges clearly from this analysis is that the use of the cat-
egory of ‘minority’ to describe French policy in Syria has generally been unsat-
isfactory, largely because it assumes that minorities - and a majority - existed
in Syria at the outset of the mandate. If we accept the term as meaningful at
all, what made groups as diverse as Syrian ‘Alawis, Greek Orthodox Christians
or Kurds into ‘minorities’ was the emergence and development in this period

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 6 1

of a Syrian nation-state with an Arab identity. The same goes for the majority.
Even within French rhetoric about Syrian society, the concept of minority only
became prominent in the second half of the mandate period.

The rest of this book explores certain specific themes illustrating the different
processes that acted to make the concept of minority ever more meaningful
in the 1920s and 1930s. In Chapter 1, I noted the importance of a coherent
national territory under something approaching a uniform state authority:
until these develop there is no reason for members of specific communities to
start to see themselves as linked to all other members of the same communities
within the state, whether as a majority or minorities. Here, I have noted that
describing the Druzes and ‘Alawis as ‘compact minorities’ implies the prior
existence of a Syrian national territory to which the Druze and ‘Alawi statelets
- and the Druzes and ‘Alawis themselves - ‘belonged’. In Chapter 3, 1 use the
Druze and ‘Alawi cases, and several others, to show how the issue of ‘sepa-
ratism’ illustrates both the development of a new conception of the national
territory and the spread of state authority. Chapter 4 continues my analysis of
the intensification of the state’s authority over its territory by examining the
causes and effects of the definition of the Syrian-Turkish frontier. It draws out
the complex relationship between the definition of frontiers and the emergence
of minorities by studying Syria’s Kurds.

The final two chapters focus on developments in international and Syrian
law. Chapter 5 places the emergence of the language of minorities in Syria
in the context of developments in international law between the wars, as the
nation-state became the standard state form. The change was not just termino-
logical: the existence of a (novel) body of international law relating to ‘minori-
ties’ meant that the term had a specific legal content and political implications.
But, as I have noted here, it was not until the treaty negotiations of the 1930s
that the term became widely used in Syria. Chapter 5 explains why; it also
shows what different individuals and groups within the different communities
stood to gain, and lose, by adopting this language. The final chapter, mean-
while, uses French attempts to reform personal status law in Syria - part of the
effort to structure the religious division of Syrian society described above - to
illustrate how the increasing systematisation and ‘uniformisation’ of the state’s
relationship to society contributed to the development of a sense of being
a minority among certain populations. It also provided an opportunity for
certain figures to claim to speak for a majority.

Notes

1. Robert de Beauplan, On va la Syrie ? Le mandat sons les cedres (Paris: J. Tallandier,
1929), p. 53.

2. Beauplan, On va la Syrie?, p. 32.

6i J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

3. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate; Hourani, Syria and Lebanon; Longrigg,
Syria and Lebanon.

4. Edmund Burke, III, ‘A comparative view of French native policy in Morocco and
Syria, 1912-1925’, Middle Eastern Studies (1973), 9(3): 175-86.

5. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 80-2; N. E. Bou-Nacklie, ‘Les Troupes
Speciales: religious and ethnic recruitment, 1916-46’, International Journal of
Middle East Studies (1993), 25(4): 645-60; Mizrahi, Gen'ese de I’Etat mandataire,
pp. 152-4.

6. Vahe Tachjian, La France en Cilicie et en Haute-Mesopotamie. Aux conftns de la
Turquie, de la Syrie et de I’lrak (1919-1933) (Paris: Karthala, 2004), pp. 32-3 and
passim.

7. Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (London: I. B.
Tauris, 1988), chs 1-2.

8. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 628-30; also pp. 133-4 of Eyal Zisser,
‘The ‘Alawis, lords of Syria: from ethnic minority to ruling sect’, in Ofra Bengio
and Gabriel Ben-Dor (eds), Minorities and the State in the Arab World (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), pp. 129-45.

9. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 191-2, 196, 206.

10. Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt.

11. E.g., in Itamar Rabinovich, ‘The compact minorities and the Syrian state,
1918-1945’, Journal of Contemporary History (1979), 14(4): 693-712, or
Birgit Schaebler, ‘State(s) power and the Druzes: integration and the struggle for
social control (1838-1949)’, in Philipp and Schaebler (eds), The Syrian Land,
pp. 331-67.

12. On French policy towards Armenians, Ellen Marie Lust-Okar, ‘Failure of collabo-
ration: Armenian refugees in Syria’, Middle Eastern Studies (1996), 32(1): 53-68,
and Keith D. Watenpaugh, ‘Towards a new category of colonial theory: colonial
cooperation and the survivors’ bargain - the case of the post-genocide Armenian
community of Syria under French mandate’, in Meouchy and Sluglett (eds), The
British and French Mandates, pp. 597-622. On French policy towards refugee
communities more generally: Tachjian, La France en Cilicie.

13. Jordi Tejel Gorgas, ‘Le mouvement kurde de Turquie en exil. Continuites et discon-
tinuites du nationalisme kurde sous le mandat franqais en Syrie et au Liban (1925-
1946)’, doctoral thesis, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales/Universite
de Fribourg; Fuccaro, ‘Minorities and ethnic mobilisation’; and McDowall, A
Modern History of the Kurds, pp. 466-84 on the Kurds.

14. The term comes from Kais M. Firro, ‘Ethnicizing the Shi'is in mandatory Lebanon’,
Middle Eastern Studies (2006), 42(5): 741-59.

15. Pierre Fournie, ‘La representation des particularismes ethniques et religieux en
Syrie et au Liban’, in Blanchard et al. (eds), L’ autre et nous: «Scenes et types».
Anthropologues et historiens devant les representations des popidations coloni-
sees, des «ethnies», des «tribus» et des «races» depuis les conquetes coloniales
(Paris: ACHAC, 1995), pp. 137-41 - though note that ‘scenes and types’ were also

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 63

common tropes of urban (especially Parisian) depictions of rural France: Graham
Robb, The Discovery of France (London: Picador, 2007), p. 313.

16. See introduction, n. 1.

17. Reproduced in Gerard Khoury, Une tutelle coloniale, pp. 248-70, quote at 267.
In total the word minority is used five times in twenty-three pages; three of those
instances come in this one paragraph.

18. Beauplan, Oit va la Syrie ?, p. 50. The term is not entirely absent from Beauplan’s
book, but it is rare. In his short chapter dismantling ‘The myth of Syrian unity’
(ch. 3), where we might expect to find it often, it appears only once - a generic ref-
erence to the possible ‘extinction of the weaker minorities’ (p. 33) in the Ottoman
Levant.

19. See among others (in a now extensive literature) the articles in Benjamin Braude
and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jeivs in the Ottoman Empire: The
Functioning of a Plural Society. Vol. 1: The Central Lands and Vol. 2: The Arab
Lands (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), especially those by Cohen, Karpat
and Ma’oz; Fatma Miige Go^ek, ‘Ethnic segmentation, western education, and
political outcomes: nineteenth century Ottoman society’, Poetics Today (1993),
14(3): 507-38; Lucette Valensi, ‘Inter-communal relations and changes in religious
affiliation in the Middle East (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries)’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History (1997), 39(2): 251-69; Encyclopaedia of Islam
1999: ‘Millet’; Bruce Masters, Christians and jews in the Ottoman Arab World:
The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, removes sectarian violence in nineteenth-
century Ottoman Syria from a narrative of primordial religious (millet) hatreds,
seeing it instead as a result of identity formation under the pressure of Ottoman
modernising reforms.

20. Encyclopaedia of Islam 1999: ‘Millet’.

21. Mazower, Salonica, pp. 56-7.

22. Benjamin Braude, ‘Foundation myths of the millet system’, in Braude and Lewis
(eds), Christians and jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1, pp. 69-88: see pp. 74-7
and following.

23. Haut Commissariat de la Republique franqaise a Beyrouth, La Syrie et le Liban
en 1922 (Paris: Emile Larose, 1922), p. 53. ‘Nation’ here is likely a translation of
millet - which has become the modern Turkish word for ‘nation’.

24. De facto, the mandates pre-dated the League, having been granted to Britain
and France at San Remo in 1920 by the chief Allied powers: namely, Britain and
France.

25. James L. Gelvin, ‘The other Arab nationalism: Syrian/Arab populism in its his-
torical and international contexts’, in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (eds),
Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997), pp. 231-48, and Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass
Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (London: University of California Press,
1998).

6 4 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

26. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 55-7; Burke, ‘A comparative view’.
Burke states that in the early 1920s the French in Syria sought to administer certain
‘minorities’ separately; for reasons that will become clear, I would argue that the
French did not systematically apply the concept of ‘minority’ to their Syrian policy
until later, and that it is inappropriate for historians to use it in this context.
Burke does not use the term ‘majority’, but is the only historian I have encoun-
tered to describe the Bedouin as a ‘minority’. The standard English-language
work on Lyautey in Morocco is Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: Protectorate
Administration, 1912-1925 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970).

27. M. E. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East 1792-1923 (London: Longman,
1987), pp. 112-14.

28. Yusuf al-Hakim, Suriyya wal-intidab al-faransi: dhikriydt IV (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar
lil-Nashr, 1983), p. 53. See also Firro, ‘Ethnicizing the Shi'is’.

29. AD-SL Box 494, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien - Application - Question des
minorities. Martel to MAE, 19/4/1938.

30. It will be apparent from my laborious terminology that I do not take ‘Arab’
identity for granted.

31. See Introduction and Chapter 3 for the argument that Syria under the mandate can
be taken as a nation-state in formation despite the territorial subdivisions imposed
by France.

32. Bou-Nacklie, ‘Les Troupes speckles’, p. 645. This useful point is unfortunately
undermined by Bou-Nacklie’s confused use of statistics.

33. This and following quotation from Alif BcV, 27 October 1923.

34. ‘al-ndtiqa bil-dad ’ literally means ‘pronouncing the dad’, a reference to the
emphatic ‘d’ that is a characteristic sound of Arabic.

35. AD-SL Box 571, dossier La question des Kurdes en Syrie. Correspondance. Les
Comites Kurdes. HC’s assistant delegate for Aleppo vilayet to TIC (16/5/1930).

36. AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, subdossier Armement des villages tcherkess de
Boueidan, Blei, Bourak. HC’s delegate to State of Syria (Veber) to HC’s delegate
to Controle General des Wakfs (23/2/1928).

37. This and following quotes from AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, subdossier
Armement des villages tcherkess de Boueidan, Blei, Bourak. Note (2/3/1928) by
HC’s delegate to Controle General des Wakfs. NB: The use here of ‘ethnic minor-
ity’ precedes Le Robert’s first cited instance.

38. SHAT 4 H Box 122, dossier 1. Note sur la situation politique dans le Levant
[1924J.

39. See Chapter 4.

40. SHAT 4 H Box 261, dossier 1 Historique du Groupement d’escadrons legers du
Levant, 1922-1926.

41. Ulfat al-Idilbi, Dimashq ya basmat al-huzn (Damascus: Dar Tlass, 1989), p. 190.

42. Provided that they caused no trouble. Hanna Batatu notes that, when necessary,
the Ottoman state was quite capable of projecting its power into the ‘Alawi moun-
tains, for short periods at least: Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of its Lesser

‘Minorities’ and the French Mandate [ 65

Rural Notability, and their Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), ch. 8.

43. Schaebler, ‘State(s) power and the Druzes’, pp. 336-9, gives evidence of such a
relationship between the Ottoman state and the Druzes of Syria.

44. Rabinovich, ‘The compact minorities’; Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, ch.

20 .

45. For reasons explained in Chapter 3, 1 prefer to avoid the term ‘separatist’.

46. AD-SL Box 410, untitled dossier. Schoeffler (Governor of Latakia) to Meyrier
(Delegate General of HC), 4/4/1936 - copy of statement accompanying letter.
Emphasis added.

47. Al-Hakim, Suriyya wal-intidab al-faransT.

48. A report by General Gamelin places the recruitment of Druze and ‘Alawi units
in the context of the army’s political preference for maintaining territorial divi-
sions in Syria: SHAT 4 H Box 134, dossier 2: 1926. Doubles: rapports Gamelin.
Correspondances. Situations d’effectifs. Gamelin to Minister of War and others
(21/8/192 6).

49. See Chapter 3.

50. Many of the observations made here would likely also apply to Syria’s Jewish com-
munity in the mandate period, with the proviso that the community was very small
and, relative to the Christian communities, unhierarchical.

51. Compare Firro’s depiction of French policy towards Shi'i leaders in Lebanon,
‘rewarding] leaders who sided with the Mandate and the Lebanese state, while
marginalizing those who remained loyal to Syrian unity’: ‘Ethnicizing the Shi'is’, p.
747.

52. See Chapter 5.

53. AD-SL Box 493, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien. Minorites. Sous-dossiers. Nouri to
HC, 7/8/1936. A French translation is also included. Nouri was Patriarchal Vicar
of the Syrian-Catholics.

54. AD-SL Box 494, dossier La question des minorites a la suite de revolution du
probleme syrien. Enclosed with Information n° 214, Surete generate, Aleppo
3/3/1936.

55. See Chapter 5.

56. Reprinted in al-Rayyis, Yd dhalam al-sijn, pp. 225-9; quote at 226.

57. Al-Rayyis, Yd dhalam al-sijn, pp. 226-7. Note the incorporation of the Shi'a,
whether they like it or not, into an ‘Arab Muslim’ majority as envisaged by a
Sunni.

58. AD-SL Box 571, dossier La question des Kurdes en Syrie. Correspondance. Les
Comites Kurdes. HC’s assistant delegate for Aleppo vilayet to HC, 16/5/1930.

59. See also Chapter 6.

60. Berkes, The Development of Secularism, p. 188. See also Masters, Christians and
Jews.

61. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 425.

62. Private papers of Albert Zurayq, kindly made available to me by Souheil Chebat.

66 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

63. AD-SL Box 493, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien. Minorites. Sous-dossiers. Meyrier to
MAE, 8/5/193 6.

64. See Barkey, Empire of Difference, ch. 4 on the ‘capacious administration of differ-
ence’ in the Ottoman Empire, and ch. 8 on the increasingly rigid ‘bounded identi-
ties’ that emerged in the ‘struggle from empire to nation-state’.

65. AD-SL Box 494, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien - Application - Question des
Minorites. Martel to MAE (7/7/1937).

66. Being refugees from elsewhere, in the mandate period at least these groups seem to
have been considered by all concerned as separate from Syrian society rather than
as minorities within it.

PART II

CHAPTER

3

SEPARATISM AND AUTONOMISM

Introduction

The local governor was worried about ‘separatist propaganda’ in his border
region, far from Damascus. Concerned about the ‘state of mind that reigns
among the inhabitants’, in the spring of 1939 he sent a secret report to the
interior ministry. 1 The people of his governorate, he wrote, were ‘very close
in their characteristics and customs’ to the inhabitants of the neighbouring
state, a feeling reinforced by ‘their close communication with it’. In the main
town, a preacher had stated that the district ‘does not recognise the [Syrian]
government nor the president of the Republic’. Alarmingly, this sentiment
resonated with the local population, who manifested ‘hostility towards the
Syrian government and its employees, especially those who are not local people
[man kdn min gbayr abdlT al-mintaqa]' . The governor feared for the state’s
ability to control the situation, especially with a tiny police force whose men
were all locals, and of suspect loyalty; and the local French colonel was keen
to intervene, which would further undermine the National Bloc government’s
authority in the area.

Separatist mobilisations of the kind that worried this Syrian official were a
common feature of life in the new nation-states of the inter-war world, though
perhaps less common than exaggerated state fears about them. Both are still
with us. From the Polish government’s attitude to its German population in
the 1920s to the Turkish Republic’s fears of its Kurds today, separatism has
also commonly been associated with minorities. Political mobilisations among
minority populations are often assumed to be separatist in their ultimate, if not
their immediate, aims - at least when the population concerned is large and
concentrated enough to form a state by itself (Kurds today), or has links with
a neighbouring state (Germans in the 1920s).

70 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Our opening example shows, however, that the connection between sepa-
ratism and minorities is not self-evident. The ‘separatist propaganda’ that the
governor feared was not circulating in the Sanjak of Alexandretta, among
Turkish-speakers favouring reunification with Turkey, nor among Kurds in
the northeast of Syria hoping to create a Kurdish state with their kinsfolk over
the border, at the expense of both existing countries. It was not grounded
in a religious identity, like those of the ‘Alawis, Druzes or Maronites, which
French support had indeed raised to political autonomy (or independence)
from Damascus. The governor’s district was the Euphrates, its chief town Dayr
al-Zur. The inhabitants of both town and governorate were overwhelmingly
Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslims: people usually assumed to be part of the
majority in Syria, not associated with separatist mobilisations or susceptibility
to French divide-and-rule. And yet their nationalist governor, as we will see,
viewed them as both culturally other and politically untrustworthy - just like
a minority.

This chapter therefore offers a critical analysis of the issue of ‘separatism’ in
French mandate Syria, to illuminate two related processes: the development of
a concept of ‘national territory’, and the expansion of state authority within a
new nation-state form. Looking at the issue in this light allows us to question
a number of easily-made assumptions - including the assumption that certain
mobilisations are ‘separatist’. The first part of the chapter argues that the ques-
tion of separatism, infisaliyya, was used in the nationalist press in order to
create and diffuse the notion of a national territory (and the nation it belonged
to) in the minds of their readers. The second examines a number of separatist
or autonomist mobilisations and argues that they were above all a reaction
to the increasing presence of the state at regional and local level in Syria. The
mobilisations I discuss occurred among both ‘minorities’ and the ‘majority’;
the similarities between them allow us to reappraise the relationship between
minority identities and separatism.

Nationalism and ‘Separatism’

Separatism divides territory. States depend in part on their control of terri-
tory, especially in the modern period when a sacralised notion of an indivis-
ible national territory has become central to the ideology of nationalism. 2 By
dividing its territory, separatism poses an existential threat to the nation-state.
Nation-states and nationalists are therefore particularly fearful of, and ideo-
logically hostile to, separatist movements that threaten ‘their’ national terri-
tory. By the same token, separatist movements - which in the modern period
frequently adopt nationalist ideology for themselves - are fearful of and hostile
to nationalisms and states that rule or claim the territory that is the object of
their own aspirations.

The question of separatism poses two distinct but linked problems for

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 7i

nationalism: how, in relation to the ‘nation’, to place the populations associ-
ated with separatist aspirations; and how to assert that the territory which
is the object of those aspirations is in fact part of the national territory as
defined by nationalists. When we read nationalist texts about separatism in
the mandate period, especially newspaper articles, the development and diver-
sity of nationalist attitudes towards the ‘national territory’ of Syria, and the
relationship between it and the population, are clear to see.

Although the simplest definition of nationalism is the belief that the borders
of nations should be congruent with those of states, nationalisms do not neces-
sarily emerge with a fully-formed notion of what the national state should look
like, or even with a belief that the only possible vehicle for national aspirations
is an independent nation-state. The Arabism to which various modern forms
of Arab nationalism trace their origins began, within an Ottoman context,
as a movement of cultural reinvigoration to which it would be difficult to
ascribe a precise territorial identity: after all, Istanbul was one of its important
centres. Even as Arabist aspirations took on a more specific territorial identity
(attached to the Arab provinces of the empire), prior to the First World War
they did so mostly within the context of the Ottoman decentralisation move-
ment rather than in the context of outright separatism: for the politically
active sections of Ottoman Arab society, the empire’s institutions continued to
provide an acceptable framework for political action. 3 Nor did Arabism neces-
sarily make the exclusive claim to territory that a modern nationalism does,
that the Arab provinces of the empire were the rightful home of Arabs only. It
would be redundant to outline here the complicated history of the emergence
of such exclusive claims within Arab nationalism prior to 1920, and the chang-
ing territorial units that were their object; but a brief overview of the concept
of the national territory as it existed in nationalist thought immediately prior
to the mandate, during Syria’s short-lived independence, is useful. 4

In his work on popular nationalism in Faysali Syria, James Gelvin discusses
the steps by which nationalist aspirations came to focus around the slogan ‘the
complete independence of Syria within its natural frontiers’, a call which won
much greater popular acceptance in Syria’s towns than wider definitions of the
state that included the Arabian peninsula or Iraq. 5 Because of its popularity,
this fairly specific conception of the territory was adopted and promoted by
the Faysali government. Syria’s ‘natural frontiers’ were roughly defined in a
number of nationalist texts as running from the Taurus mountains in the north
to Mada’in Salih in the south, and from the Mediterranean coast and the line
linking Rafah to ‘Aqaba in the west to the Euphrates and Khabur rivers in the
east.

Gelvin is duly cautious about the notion of ‘natural frontiers’, showing
what material, social and economic (rather than ‘natural’) developments
underlay the popular appeal of this construction of Syrian territory. 6 However,
I would suggest that an even greater degree of caution is in order with respect

72 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

to the popularity of this conception of the national territory. The view of the
national territory described here, while not just the view from the top, is cer-
tainly the view from the centre. If, by 1919, there was a broad popular consen-
sus in the towns - especially Damascus - around this construction of the Syrian
national territory, there is no reason to assume that the same view prevailed
in rural areas, particularly where the population did not share the dominant
language and religion of the towns. As Peter Sluglett puts it, recent historical
work that examines the development of nationalism by focusing mainly on
Damascus does not ‘give much consideration to the practical, political and
ideological difficulties raised by the creation of a state whose constituent parts
had not previously considered themselves part of that wider whole’. 7

Those difficulties are the focus here. An approximate idea of ‘natural’
frontiers may be sufficient for rallying popular support, particularly under the
threat of imperialist aggression and division, but nation-states require precisely-
defined frontiers. 8 The nation-state form imposed on Syria under the mandate
had such frontiers. Much more cramped than the ‘natural’ frontiers described
above, they nonetheless contained plenty of people who, to put it mildly, had
not fully assimilated nationalist goals. Although several currents within Syrian
Arab nationalism retained a more expansive vision for the national territory,
the discussion here concentrates on attitudes to the actual territory of Syria
under mandate: the territory, already recognised internationally as belonging
to a Syrian nation-state, which independent Syria would (more or less) inherit.

That inheritance was frequently in doubt, because of French unwillingness
to relinquish imperial control and because of the territorial divisions imposed
on the mandate territories. The risk that further divisions might be imposed,
and that some or all of them would become permanent, was real. A fundamen-
tal concern for nationalists was therefore to oppose the tamziq or tajzi’a - dis-
memberment or division - of Syrian territory. It is hardly surprising, therefore,
if autonomist or separatist mobilisations of any kind were viewed with great
suspicion in Damascus. But we should be wary of making assumptions either
about the origins of such mobilisations, or about the nature of nationalist
suspicions.

If nationalists opposed the division of Syria, by the same token they promoted
the country’s territorial unity, or reunification. However, the justifications
they gave for that unity vary greatly. Sometimes they made reference to the
populations of Syria’s divided regions, and to their aspirations, separatist or
not. At other times attitudes to territorial unity were expressed in a way which
overrode the wishes of, or even ignored, local populations.

One way of countering separatism was to understand and explain it. In a
1923 report in Alif Bd, this Damascus newspaper’s correspondent in Latakia
described competing calls in the Alaouites, 9 then an autonomous part of the
Syrian Federation, for the region’s complete separation or its full reunification

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 73

with a unitary Syrian state. The terms he uses to refer to separation are
emotive: not just infisal, ‘separation’, but also the somewhat sharper faskb,
‘severing, sundering’ and insildkb, which means ‘becoming detached’ but
derives this meaning from the action of flaying. ‘Those who demand sepa-
ration’, he said, ‘are the Christians en masse and a great proportion of the
‘Alawis’. 10 The numerical preponderance of the ‘Alawis was the justification
for the separation of the Latakia statelet; but in political matters, the author
stated, the ‘Alawis were ‘followers of the influential’, and their leaders were
‘simple folk’. Their calls for separation, it is strongly implied, derived from the
‘interference’ of the French-controlled government. Partly true, no doubt; but
nonetheless, one gets the impression that the author was not writing for an
‘Alawi audience.

Separatism among the region’s Christians was more sympathetically ana-
lysed. According to the writer, they were pro-separatist because, although a
(numerical) minority in the Alaouites, they dominated bureaucratic jobs there:
the community depended economically on this privileged relationship with
the administration, and feared it would lose it in a unified Syria. They were
therefore ‘temporarily justified’ in their separatism, but nevertheless mistaken
because ‘they do not look to the long term’ and see how unification would
benefit everyone, for example by the development of the port of Latakia. But
‘they do not want to look at all this, and other tangible benefits, in the face
of the temporary benefit of individuals among them [ manfa ‘at afrad minhum
manfa‘atan mu’aqqatatan]'.

This author acknowledged the existence of widespread separatist feeling
and accepted that the reasons for it were real, albeit mistaken. Another
response to separatist mobilisations was to claim that they were unrepresenta-
tive of the population as a whole: that is, to accept that separatist feeling
existed but to deny that it was widespread. Such assertions came not just from
the centre, but also from Syrian nationalists in supposedly separatist regions.
In the summer of the Franco-Syrian treaty negotiations (1936), the inhabitants
of six villages in the Jabal Druze sent a statement of support for Syrian unity
to the Fligh Commission’s Delegation in Damascus, criticising ‘religious chiefs
[who] have obtained full liberty to interfere in political affairs by exploiting
their traditional influence, and this in the aim of going against the popular
movement’: that is, against the popular preference for unity. 11 Around the
same time, a number of individuals in the Alaouites describing themselves as a
‘union of Christian, ‘Alawi, and Muslim youth’ went even further, saying that:

The so-called chiefs currently meeting in Tartus under the pressure and surveillance
of the intelligence services to repeat what is dictated to them for an audience in [cl
I’adresse de] France and at the League of Nations reproduce the orders of those
services, not the true wishes of the people, nor even the private wishes of those in
attendance if they were left free and sheltered from all pressure . 12

74 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

(It bears mentioning that the folders in the archives containing each of these
documents also contain documents from separatists - and French officers -
denouncing nationalists as unrepresentative of the wishes of the population. 13 )

Both of the strategies outlined above acknowledge the existence of separa-
tist or autonomist aspirations, while downplaying them either as being mis-
taken or opportunistic, or as being the choice of a small part of the population.
They also justify unity, sometimes on quite concrete material grounds, as being
a better deal not just for the ‘centre’ but for the population of autonomous or
separatist regions as well, because it will lead to economic development, or
because it is what those populations want. At other times, however, the aspi-
rations of local populations (whether separatist or unionist) are simply over-
ridden from the centre on the grounds of what might be called raison d’Etat,
or perhaps raison de nation. Whether or not those populations would benefit
from unity does not enter into consideration.

Thus, when the abortive Franco-Syrian treaty negotiations of 1933 were
being planned, Najib al-Rayyis, editor of the nationalist daily al-Qabas, wrote
an article demanding not only the incorporation of the ‘Alawi and Druze
states ‘on the basis of decentralization’, but also the reversion to Syria of the
Lebanese port of Tripoli and the railway leading to it. Fie made no reference
to the wishes of the inhabitants, separatist or otherwise - a startling omission
in the case of Tripoli, where the desire for reunification with Syria was strong.
Nor did al-Rayyis attempt to explain why unity would benefit these regions as
well as the nationalist centre: rather, he simply stated that ‘we will not accept
that they [the French] enclose us between the desert and the sea’. 14 This begs
the question, who are ‘we’? Such writings tend to assume that the populations
of areas that were the object of nationalist aspirations will simply fall into line
once unity is achieved. Again, the issue of the intended audience deserves to
be highlighted: the most revealing aspect of nationalist texts is often what they
take for granted.

Perhaps even more common are nationalist writings that, instead of coun-
tering the arguments for separatism with arguments for unity, simply declare
the area concerned to be eternally and non-negotiably a part of the Syrian ter-
ritory. This almost mystical claim is summed up by the incantatory phrase ‘the
return of [area] to its mother, Syria’. With variations, Yusuf al-Hakim used it
dozens of times in his memoirs, referring to Alexandretta and the Alaouites.
(On one occasion, and with no apparent sense of irony, he recorded the phrase
as being used by Ataturk about Alexandretta’s return to a different mother,
Turkey. 15 ) He was not alone: this formula was a commonplace of national-
ist writings about the regions wholly or partially detached from the ‘rump’
Syria under French rule. Such claims vanish the population of the territory
completely, making no reference to their aspirations - whether separatist or
nationalist. Instead, the population is submerged into a mystically unified and
eternal territorial entity. Making no argument, such claims are unarguable. If

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 75

the national territory ( watan ) is sacralised in this way, the nation as a human
community (qawm, umma) disappears - even its properly nationalist elements.
It goes without saying that politics, too, is elided. One can see the value of such
an approach for a nationalist making a claim to a strategically useful piece of
territory.

Nationalism is built on the idea of a specific and three-sided relationship
between a particular state, population and territory. State forms other than
the nation-state do not attach the same importance to a specific population,
dwelling on a specific territory: in pre-modern monarchies, in dynastic empires
and even colonial empires into the modern period, the relationship between
state and territory is neither so fixed, nor so dependent on the state’s claim
to represent the population of that territory. Such state forms can, without
contradiction, rule a territory and its local population by means of a bureauc-
racy and coercive forces brought in from elsewhere, with no reference to that
population’s wishes. When nation-states do the same - as they certainly do 16
- they must at least claim to represent the population of the territory they
rule. If parts of the population are unwilling to accept that claim, then they
must either be made to do so (by coercion, co-optation or persuasion) or be
rejected as part of the national community. This being so, it is ironic that of the
nationalist conceptions of territory outlined above, the one which most effec-
tively ‘disappears’ the population, along with all human agency, is in a sense
the most purely nationalist: the one which regards the national territory as an
eternal and indissociable unit in and of itself. But in the positions outlined so
far there is little sense of either national community or national territory as
shared human constructions.

An exception to this trend comes in an article about the far northeast of
Syria in the Damascus newspaper Alif Bd’, which explicitly addressed the
relationship between population, territory and state. It did so in a way which,
unusually, emphasised the agency in constructing a national territory not just
of the population in general, but of populations remote from the geographical
centres, and culturally-defined mainstream, of Syrian Arab nationalism. This
account can be usefully compared with another, very different, report on the
same situation published a week later by a second Damascus paper, al-Ayydm.
Although the two texts can both be described as nationalist, the comparison
reveals a radically different approach to the events they report - and, more
generally, to nationalist conceptions of territory as they are illuminated by
the question of (supposed) separatism. Comparing the two texts allows us
to examine those conceptions in depth. The purpose is not to give a compre-
hensive overview of nationalist attitudes to the national territory in Syria:
that would be impossible. Rather, my intention is to suggest a way of reading
nationalist texts that, rather than taking the existence of a national territory
for granted, questions the existence of such a thing - and, I hope, thereby offers
a better understanding of how national territories are created.

76 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

The two articles date from September 1932, and they both report on
confrontations that had occurred in the far northeast of Syria, the Jazira (see
Map 2, p. vii), between the local population, on the one hand, and the local
branches of the Syrian administration, on the other. The Jazira was largely
inhabited by Christians and Kurds, many of whom had fled the nationalism
of the early Turkish Republic; 17 while they were generally happy to deal with
representatives of the mandatory authorities (which in this region meant mili-
tary officers), they had a much more tense relationship with the representatives
of the Syrian state bureaucracy centred on Damascus. The local French officers
were quite happy to play up these tensions in order to undermine the author-
ity of ‘Damascus’. This situation had led to the clashes that these two articles
reported. The underlying tensions would only grow as the 1930s progressed,
as the region’s Christian population rapidly increased with the installation of
Assyrian refugees from Iraq, and its economic importance within Syria also
grew - a not unrelated fact, which also contributed to the growing interest in
the region on the part of Syrian Arab nationalists in the urban centres. These
articles thus presaged later events in the region. Their different interpretations
of this unrest are evident from the start, in the articles’ headlines: Alif Bd’ had
‘No separatist movement in the Jazira. The unrest in the Jazira and its causes’,
while al-Ayydm introduced the same events with the title ‘Separatist rebels . . .
Are they creating a new “sixth” government in Syria[ ?] ’. 18

The article in Alif Ba began by referring to an earlier piece (in the
Aleppo newspaper al-Ittihdd) which had characterised the local population as
Christians who had migrated from Mardin, over the border in Turkey, ‘and
settled in Syrian territory’. It had also claimed that:

the French authorities have settled them in Hasaka and Ra’s al-'Ayn and Qamishli,
made it easy for them to [find] work, and opened commercial markets to them, and
that the people had demanded separation from Syria and the creation of a homeland
of their own [watan khdss bihim ]. 19

According to the Aleppo newspaper, a group of these Christians, led by priests,
had attacked the local gendarme chief.

AlifBd’ set out to rebut these claims and the assumptions underlying them.
Tellingly, it began its rebuttal by describing neither the events nor the people
involved, but rather the territory on which these events unfolded:

In response to this, I say that the territories of Qamishli, Hasaka, ‘Amuda,
Darbisiyya, Ra’s al-‘Ayn and Tall Abyad were empty and desolate, the abode of
predatory animals, a place of attacks and raids in which lives were lost [tuzhaq fihd
al-arwdh, lit. ‘ghosts were given up’] and blood was shed . . . And now, by the effort
of the sons of the country and with the help of the mandatory state they have become
civilized, populated lands.

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 77

From the start, and throughout the article, the author lays out a particular
vision of the relationship between territory and population in which it was
the efforts of the population - recognised as part of the nation - that made
the territory ‘national’. The transformation of the Jazira from desolation to
civilisation was what made it into part of Syria’s national territory. Simply by
referring to these territories by name and discussing them in a national public
sphere, the author diffused the notion of their belonging to the Syrian ‘nation’
among a reading public concentrated far away from these border territories
in the urban centres. But the article made clear that the agents of the Jazira’s
transformation into a productive territory, and thus into a part of Syria,
were the region’s inhabitants, what it called the ‘sons of the country [abna
al-bilad]’. This itself is a significant phrase: the early twentieth century saw a
shift in attitudes towards the lower classes (especially peasants) in literate dis-
course, a shift closely associated with the age of mass politics and nationalism.
The peasants (and workers) of earlier ages were the object, not the subject,
of politics: there to be ruled over. By contrast, the ‘son of the country’ may
be rustic and uneducated, but he is born of the national territory and is part
of, indeed, is the foundation of, the national political community. This is the
transformation of workers and peasants, as Joel Beinin puts it, ‘from rabble to
citizens of the nation ’. 20

What, then, of the claim that these ‘sons of the country’ were recent
migrants from over the Turkish border? Alif Bd’ made no attempt to deny it,
but rather demonstrated that this did not make them illegitimate incomers:

These territories are the property of the people of Mardin and the Kurds of Tur
al- c Abidin and its dependencies!,] Muslims, Christians and Jews. When the unfore-
seen political events [al-taimri’ al-siydsiyya] occurred these territories were separated
from Mardin and Diyarbakir and their appendagesj, and] the owners of the land
were obliged by their attachment [bi-tab‘ihim\ to travel to their lands. Therefore
these are not, as the respected writer [in al-Ittihad] claimed, foreign migrants who
have settled in Syria.

The writer firmly attributed right of ownership over this land to the current
inhabitants, even though they had previously lived in towns now separated
from the region by ‘unforeseen political events’: the destruction of the Ottoman
Empire and establishment of a new border. This implied that these populations
had chosen Syria over Turkey. The author did not express an opinion as to
whether the new border was in the right place. He did, however, assert that
it was a recent creation, and that the inhabitants of the Jazira had every right
to be on this side of it even if they used to live on the other. (He also gave a
clear impression of religious and linguistic diversity, and was comfortable with
it.) Seen from Aleppo or Damascus, Syria’s northeastern border might well
look like a distant horizon beyond which all was alien. But unlike al-Ittibad,

78 J

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

AlifBd’s correspondent - even though his newspaper, too, was published in a
distant urban centre - made the effort to look at the border from the perspec-
tive of those whose lives were directly affected by it. Seen from up close, the
border was a novel political development that had cut land off from its owners
and severed towns from their natural hinterland.

Addressing the question of trade, the article expanded on this point. For
Alif Ba, it was the people of the Jazira who had developed the region and
opened it to trade with Aleppo. Indeed, had they not done so Aleppo ‘would
have lost its commercial status for good’, because, coming back to the ques-
tion of the border, Aleppo’s trade had previously been oriented towards areas
now included in the Republic of Turkey: ‘Therefore, there remains no trading
outlet for Aleppo except the outlet of the Jazira, which was built by the effort
and wealth of its [the Jazira’s] sons.’ The author also acknowledged the French
assistance that had made this development possible.

Alif Ba was a ‘moderate’ newspaper, hence its acknowledgement of the
colonial power’s role in developing the Jazira. But there is no doubt that
the vision of territory and population put forward here was a nationalist one:
the author emphatically did claim the Jazira as part of Syria. He did not base
that claim on a mystical, eternal notion of the national territory, though (the
Jazira belonging naturally to its ‘mother’ Syria), nor on the strategic impera-
tives of the Syrian state (such as access to the region’s water resources). Instead,
the Jazira became part of Syria by the human agency of its own population:
their development of the previously desolate region had provided Aleppo with
a new hinterland, saving the city from the loss of the old. The largest city
and most remote rural region in the French mandate territories were bound
together in a new economic relationship that mutually benefited both. From
such human processes, the national territory was made: a relationship built, in
this conception, from the periphery to the centre.

Such was the structural foundation of recent events, as described in the
article. Only after this lengthy introduction did the writer return to those
events: what al-Ittihad had apparently described as an assault on the gendarme
chief in the town of Qamishli by a group of Christians, led by priests, with
separatist ambitions, and the immediate purpose of releasing an imprisoned
Christian leader. Not so, said Alif Bd’: the protest resulted from ‘the chaos and
corruption of the qa’immaqam and the justice of the peace, who have planted
the spirit of religious, sectarian, racial, and national division in [people’s]
minds’.

In this reading, then, the Qamishli demonstration was not a separatist
mobilisation, but a popular protest against the misdeeds of local representa-
tives of the central state bureaucracy. It was these two bureaucrats who were
guilty of sowing division, not the French, who were (justifiably enough)
the more usual target of such an accusation. Until the appointment of these
officials, the Jazira had been undisturbed by unrest and ‘the people, in their

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 79

different elements [‘ anasir] , had enjoyed their rights and worked together
[yiddmilun] in justice and equality’. Petitions and protests against the two men
went unanswered; instead, they

increased in tyranny, and used every means to divide opinion. They incited the
Arab [that is, Bedouin] tribes to attack and destroy Qamishli by claiming that
the Christian inhabitants intended to kill the Muslim functionaries; the inhabit-
ants feared the results, so they undertook a peaceful demonstration in which every
element participated - Muslims, Christians, and Jews - and demanded that the
government send the tribes and the armed Bedouin back to their homes, and deliver
them from the corruption of the qa’immaqam . . .

All in all, the article is a sustained elaboration of the position outlined in its
title. It is a fascinating example of how a Syrian nation and its territory were
imagined through the debate on separatism; and if it almost certainly underes-
timates the extent of separatist feeling in the Jazira, it nonetheless understands
the region, and the state’s actions there, unusually well.

The prominent nationalist journalist Nasuh Babil, writing about the same
subject in his newspaper al-Ayyam a week later, offered a very different under-
standing of nation, state and territory. This is already clear from the title of
the article, which characterised the population of the region as ‘separatist
rebels’. The subtitle connected the allegedly separatist intentions of the Jazira’s
population with the administrative divisions imposed on Syria by France: to
the five ‘governments’ into which the mandate territories were already divided
(the state of Syria itself, the autonomous statelets of the Alaouites and the
Jabal Druze, the Sanjak of Alexandretta and the ‘independent’ Lebanon), the
separatists wanted to add a sixth.

Whereas the article in Alif B a made explicit references to the diversity of
the region’s inhabitants, both linguistically (specifically mentioning Kurds and
Arabs) and religiously (Muslims, Christians, Jews), the article in al-Ayyam
made only passing references to the cultural identity of the population.
Describing unrest among the inhabitants of ‘Ayn Diwar, Babil mentioned that
‘most of them are Armenian [aktharubum min al-arman]’ . 21 This simplification
identified the ‘rebels’ as non-Syrian, non-Arab, non-Muslim refugees: in every
respect outside the nation as he conceived it, and - more to the point - distant
from al-Ayyam’ s target audience of Damascene Muslim Arabs. While Babil
did not specifically describe the ‘separatists’ as Christians, except implicitly by
this reference to some of them as Armenians, his article prominently displayed
its own Islamic identity: it began with the invocation ‘Praise be to God; there
is no power and no strength except through God [ subban Allah wa Id bawl
wa la quwwa ilia billdb]’. 22 Babil also skipped over the relationship between
the population of the Jazira and the territory itself. Whereas Alif Ba’ carefully
established that the people of the region were legitimate owners of the land and

80 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

had by their own efforts transformed it from desolation to productivity, to the
benefit of the Syrian nation, al-Ayyam made no attempt here to explain how
the population was related to the land. 23

The author did, however, give an account of the state’s relationship to the
territory - in some respects vaguer but in others more explicit than that given
in Alif Ba. In Alif Bd’s version the Jazira had been made a part of Syria by
the efforts of its own inhabitants - a process in which the Syrian state seem-
ingly played no role, though the mandatory authorities did. By contrast, Babil
simply took for granted that the territory was a part of Syria, making no effort
to explain why. He did, though, offer a clear picture of the role in the terri-
tory of the central state, or rather government (hukdma). 24 He did this largely
by outlining the offences committed against the authority of the government
(unquestioningly taken as legitimate) by the ‘rebels’. These included the rebels’
attack on the prison - to release a prisoner who, in Babil’s view, had been
quite legitimately detained - and expulsion of the qa’immaqam of Qamishli. In
‘Ayn Diwar, the (‘mostly Armenian’) inhabitants had attacked the local doctor
along with ‘some of the officials of the caza, and lowered the flag of the con-
stitution from Government House and insulted it; they threatened anyone who
went against their will with murder’.

There is a clear notion here of the state imposing order, through its officials
and symbols, and of the local population as the (criminally resistant) objects of
this imposition. Thus, the qa’immaqam of Qamishli had been expelled ‘not for
a reason, but because his presence in the caza was unsympathetic to those who
insulted the government, infringed its laws and attacked its employees, because
he was intent on applying the law and punishing the transgressor’. Babil
described those who committed this act as ‘chaos-causers [fatvdawiyyin]’ ,
whose actions had ‘exacerbated their rebellion and their going against
[khurujahum c ala] the government in a regrettable and quite intolerable way’.
Meanwhile, the functionaries who had fled to Aleppo and Damascus refused
to go back to their posts until they could be sure of their safety - and sure that
the people understood

that there is in ‘Ayn Diwar and Qamishli an authority that can punish rebels, that
is capable of curbing their recalcitrance, and that is able to apply the law, raise the
flag, and convince everyone \ilqa al-qand c a fil-nnfus ] that there is in the country a
government that has respect, honour, standing, and authority.

One thing that stands out in this account is Babil’s insistence on respect for
the symbols of state authority - the flag, Government House - and the equa-
tion of that symbolic authority with real authority. Even more striking is the
unidirectional nature of that authority, which emanates from the centre and is
applied to the periphery.

This point is worth lingering on. The manifest content of this piece is a

Separatism and Autonomism

protest against infringements of the state’s authority in peripheral regions, by
populations who are also characterised as peripheral (if not merely alien). But
the latent content of the article is the assertion of that state’s authority every-
where on its territory, and perhaps particularly in the centre: after all, the
primary audience for Babil’s writing was in Damascus . 25 At the risk of making
the point too crushingly obvious, states typically respond unsympathetically to
separatist movements in peripheral zones not (or not only) because maintain-
ing control over a particular a region and its population is necessarily vital to
the strategic or economic well-being of the state, but because permitting the
state’s authority to be challenged at the periphery risks undermining it at the
centre. By the same token, asserting the state’s authority at the periphery is a
means of asserting it at the centre . 26 The political significance of separatism
goes far beyond the zones where separatist movements are active.

All of this provides a background to the attitudes expressed here by Nasuh
Babil. As a nationalist - a prominent supporter, at this stage, of the National
Bloc - Babil wanted the nationalists to have control of the Syrian state; he also
wanted that state to have full authority over the population within the largest
‘Syrian’ borders possible. In this context, therefore, the use of the word gov-
ernment ( hukuma ) is particularly salient. Syria being under French mandate,
the state (dawla) was in many senses in the hands of the French. The French
authorities were referred to as exactly that, the authorities - or rather, the
authority (al-sulta). But the government was at least nominally in the hands
of Syrians. Attacking ‘separatists’ and demanding proper respect for the gov-
ernment was a way for Babil to demand a greater role in that government
for Syrians - meaning nationalists. It also permitted him to attack the French
authorities, but indirectly enough to avoid them suspending his newspaper,
which happened often. This is all clear enough in the following passage, with
its coy reference to the French:

The government is incapable of spreading its authority in those two cazas, and feels
its own weakness, because it does not possess the strength to discipline the rebels,
a little or a lot; while those who do possess that power [that is, the French] are
unaware or feigning unawareness - we say no more than that - of everything that is
happening in those parts!

Al-Ayydm placed events in the Jazira much more directly in the context
of the formal relationship between the central state and the mandatory, an
articulation missing from the article in AlifBa. Throughout, Babil emphasised
that this ‘separatism’ undermined the central state and the institutions - parlia-
ment, the constitution, the Republic - that were supposed to be the measure
of Syria’s independence and development under French tutelage. This also
allowed him to target the non-nationalist politicians who actually made up
the Syrian government at this time, under whom it had ‘abandoned [these two

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

cazas], recognized its inability to administer them, and cleared the way for the
separatists there to announce their separation and form the sixth government,
under the protection of the republic and the constitution!’

If the government did not have the strength to maintain its presence in the
Jazira, he wrote, it should request ‘those who are responsible’ for the govern-
ment’s weakness (the French again) ‘to use that strength against the separatists,
so that if they refused the responsibility would fall upon them alone’ - rather
than falling on, and discrediting, the Syrian government. Thus, Babil used the
issue of separatism to assert the authority of the Syrian government everywhere
on its territory.

Political slogans about ‘natural frontiers’ aside, there was no self-evident
national territory in Syria prior to 1920, no more than any other ‘national
territory’ exists outside of human agency. The link between population, state
and territory is a human construction, and the debate about national terri-
tory is itself one important means for spreading the idea, in the minds of the
population, that such a thing exists. The author of the article in Alif Ba is
unusual in explicitly recognising that territory must be made ‘national’. More
often, nationalist journalists implied that the national territory already existed
by framing this debate as being about ‘separatism’. This is illustrated by the
terms they used, notably the words infisal and infisaliyya : ‘separation’ implied
that there already existed a Syrian national territory, from which ‘separatists’
wished to separate. 27 But the territory to which these writers were referring had
only recently been formed itself, by its separation from the Ottoman Empire.

What is more, in much of the territory under mandate - particularly the
more remote areas, like the mountainous Alaouites - the presence of perma-
nent state authority was a novelty of the mandate period: that is, of French
rule. Describing the late Ottoman period in the region that would become the
Alaouites, Patrick Seale notes that away from the urban centres the state was
virtually absent and offered no services:

The only expression of authority was rapacious and oppressive: the tax collector
or the mounted gendarme. It was not unknown for a single gendarme to ride into
a village, assemble the villagers, take money if they had any, kill a chicken for his
lunch, and make off back to civilization . 28

‘Abdallah Hanna, meanwhile, quotes the opinion expressed by rural Syrians in
oral history interviews carried out over several decades that ‘in Turkish times
there was no state; in French times there was a state [ sdr fi dawla]’. 29 A more
elegant rendering, and perhaps more accurate, would be ‘a state happened’.

In these circumstances, the idea that populations in regions like the
Alaouites wanted to secede from a previously existing whole is hardly satisfac-
tory, and if there was such a whole then it was the defunct Ottoman Empire,

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 83

not ‘Syria’. When nationalists used this vocabulary of inftsaliyya, then, they
were not reflecting the actual existence of such a whole, but rather attempting
to bring it into being. It is a mistake to take these texts at their word, accepting
the prior existence of a national territory rather than asking how that territory
was created. By this mistake we abstract the nation-state from history, eliding
the always complex and never frictionless processes by which states and the
political actors who control them come to exert their authority over territory

- and in the era of nationalism, over the ‘nation’ too. 30

An example of this comes from the opening chapters of Patrick Seale’s
work quoted above, an authoritative and astute biography of the former
Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad, which describe Syria and particularly the
Alaouites in the years around Asad’s birth in 1930. As Seale recounts the onset
of European rule in the former Arab provinces, the term ‘natural Syria’ - the
(imprecise) region called bilad al-Shdm in Arabic - quickly escapes its quota-
tion marks. Seale describes the fate of this ‘natural’ unit using precisely the
same cutting terms as the nationalist texts cited above: Syria was ‘carved up’;
the cession to republican Turkey of much of the Ottoman province of Aleppo
was an ‘amputation’; the special status granted to the region of Alexandretta
‘further whittled away’ the same province; the Alaouites and the Jabal Druze
‘were severed from Damascus’. 31 All of this is assuming a greater degree of
territorial coherence in bilad al-Shdm, a greater degree of separation between
it and the rest of the former Ottoman territories, and a greater acceptance of
Damascus as a natural centre and capital than is likely to have existed in the
aftermath of the First World War. Seale’s own comments about the weakness

- indeed, absence - of state authority outside the cities tend to confirm this
position; and I doubt that many notables in late Ottoman Aleppo would have
agreed with his contention that of the cities of bilad al-Shdm, ‘Damascus was
acknowledged to be the most important’. 32 European imperialism certainly
imposed divisions on the post-Ottoman Middle East, but seeing these as any-
thing other than the division of the Ottoman Empire is problematic. To see
them as the division of a ‘natural’ Syria, meanwhile, is to take as a starting
point the ideological endpoint of nationalism.

Alongside the idea of a national territory, nationalist writings of the sort
examined here also use the issue of separatism to spread the idea of belonging
to a nation. The article in Alif Bd’ encourages its readers to see the inhabit-
ants of the Jazira as Syrians, while the article in al-Ayydm does everything to
exclude them from the Syrian nation; both, however, assume that the reader
will see himself as part of that nation. 33 Up to a point this was probably
correct: nationalist writers were reflecting public opinion as well as trying to
influence it. But just as it is wrong to assume that a coherent national territory
existed simply because newspapers took its existence for granted when they
wrote about ‘separatism’ in a particular region, so it is wrong to assume that

8 4 j

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

a coherent national community existed simply because newspapers took its
existence for granted when they wrote about ‘separatism’ in a particular popu-
lation. Such texts reflect the attempt to construct a national territory and com-
munity, not their prior existence . 34 This process of construction - which takes
place in every nation-state - goes on happening long after the nation-state
is well rooted in both population and territory: nations require continuous
maintenance, as historians should recognise.

To express this risk in a slightly different way: by concentrating on the
nationalist struggle for control of the state, historians may overlook the state’s
struggle for control of population and territory - a risk that is evidently not
restricted to historians of French mandate Syria. ‘Separatist’ movements do
not simply arise from a desire to break away from some larger, supposedly
natural unit, and separatist aspirations among one part of a population are
not necessarily a function of cultural differences dividing them from the rest of
the population (differences that are often understood as a minority-majority
dynamic). Such movements do not develop in a void: they arise in response to
the presence, actions, and policies of states. The rest of the chapter explains
how. Some of the mobilisations it describes wanted full separation from Syria;
others, which I will call ‘autonomist’, shared many of the same characteristics
but did not demand formal separation.

Separatism and State Authority

So far my argument about the national territory being constructed through
the language used to describe it has been rather idealist, as if just claiming
in a Damascus newspaper that a given region belonged to Syria was enough
to make it part of the national territory. The importance of such rhetorical
constructions should not be understated: if the population in a state’s major
centres do not regard a peripheral region as being part of a shared national ter-
ritory, it might be difficult to persuade them to pay taxes and supply conscripts
in order for the state to put down a separatist rebellion there. But without a
material basis - those taxes and conscripts, as it were - the rhetorical construc-
tion of a national territory outlined above is unlikely to be effective. To put it
in Benedict Anderson’s terms, the apparatus of the state provides the material
basis that permits a national territory to be imagined. In the era of national-
ism, states (and non-state nationalist movements) claim a permanent, sacred
link with their national territories: some examples of this were offered above.
But what permits that link to be made - and what is concealed by phrases like
‘the return of Alexandretta to its mother, Syria’ - is the expansion of state
authority, real or potential, across the territory . 35

We have already seen this in the article by Nasuh Babil. As I mentioned,
Babil was most outraged by what he perceived as the disrespect of the
‘separatists’ towards the authority of the state: in a modern nation-state the

Separatism and Autonomism

[85

government must be able to raise its flag anywhere on its territory and have
that flag respected as a symbol of its authority. But that authority is expressed
in material form too: the establishment of a government presence - buildings
(dar al-hnkuma, gendarme posts) and functionaries (bureaucrats, policemen)
- even in towns and villages which would until the late Ottoman period at the
earliest have been off the government’s map, sometimes literally. 36 The physi-
cal presence of the modern state across its territory is much greater, and by
the same token so is the intrusion of the state into the lives of the population,
through taxes, conscription, education and the whole array of methods of enu-
meration and classification that underpin them. This expanded field of state
activity becomes a new field for political action, in two respects.

First, the symbolic and real manifestations of state authority immediately
become sites for the expression of discontent or opposition. National flags can
be lowered, burned, urinated on, or, indeed, first burned then urinated on, as
happened to the Syrian flag in Qamishli in 1939 (a story we will hear in the
next chapter). If buildings and functionaries now give the state a permanent
presence in even quite small, remote settlements, it is hardly surprising if they
become the focal point for the expression of political sentiment whether for
or against the state. Administrative buildings are a good example. Decrees of
the High Commissioner were in at least some cases effective from the moment
at which they were posted on the door of Government House ( c ala bdb dar
al-hukuma ), where the local bureaucracy was based in any given town or prov-
ince. 37 The local population interacted with the state at that site and through
that bureaucracy: when High Commissioner Gabriel Puaux visited the Jazira
in early 1939 it was in the government buildings of Qamishli and Hasaka
that he met representatives of the local population. 38 His visit reveals other
aspects of the expansion of state authority: the senior French official in the
entire mandate territories visited this relative backwater and was able to do so
easily, by aeroplane; he spoke to local notables and employees of the local state
bureaucracy, and inspected the garrison at Hasaka.

Such visits from on high reinforced the accurate impression of power in
residence. This is why political demonstrations in towns large and small would
make their way to the local Government House to voice their protests: for the
first three months of 1939, a small sample from the Syrian administration’s
very incomplete records yields references to demonstrations congregating in
front of the Government House in Homs, Dayr al-Zur, Dar'a and Hasaka. 39
The demonstration in Dayr al-Zur, and one of those in Homs, began at the
local government secondary school, the TajbTz ; this was evidently a wide-
spread phenomenon, and further demonstrates the point that new sites of state
authority also created new spaces for contestation. 40

The differing purposes of these demonstrations point to an irony about the
presence of state power. In Homs, Dayr al-Zur and Dar'a the demonstrations
were, like numerous others at this time, nationalist in orientation: their protests

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The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

were against the French occupation. But these and similar protests were also
directed at the Syrian government of the National Bloc - at times in straight-
forward hostility towards a by now discredited administration, at others
in support of a government held in an impossible position by France. 41 The
demonstration in Hasaka, the administrative centre of the Jazira, was different
again. Administered until the early 1930s from Dayr al-Zur, by this stage the
Jazira was a governorate in its own right. Its upgraded administrative status
reflected its rapid demographic and economic growth, but also the French wish
to administer its largely (and increasingly) Christian and Kurdish population
separately from the rest of Syria. However, after the signature of the 1936
treaty the High Commission agreed to the governorate’s administrative sub-
ordination to the Syrian bureaucracy, and the appointment of its governor by
the new National Bloc government. This change was unwelcome to significant
sections of the Jazira’s population; the local French military officers, hostile to
the treaty, also never accepted it. The demonstration recorded in January 1939
was therefore outspokenly anti-nationalist and carried French flags; but it was
not simply pro-French. As well as expressing their opposition to Syrian Arab
nationalist rule from Damascus, Syrian-Catholic 42 Christians were demanding
the release of several Christians detained in connection with the abduction of
the (nationalist-appointed) governor of the Jazira, and protesting against their
own local leaders and the French authorities who together had been promising
their release for some time. 43 The irony revealed by all this is that the apparatus
of state power can be in different hands, sometimes simultaneously. Its expan-
sion provides a space for contestation that may target that power at a number
of different, and sometimes contradictory, levels: the Government House was
correctly seen as a locus of both French and Syrian power.

The French had developed the state apparatus in Syria as an instrument of
their own rule, although it was overwhelmingly staffed by Syrians. 44 For their
part, Syrian nationalists wanted the theory of the mandate to be translated
into practice: they wanted Syrians - more specifically, themselves - to control
the state apparatus. Anti-nationalists, in turn, contested their control. So if the
first sense in which the expansion of the state apparatus created a new field
for political action was that the new physical manifestations of state authority
became focal points for the expression of discontent, opposition or support,
the second, more important sense was that the expanded state apparatus itself
became the object of contestation.

The expansion of a modern state apparatus in the geographical region
of bilad al-Sham did not begin in the mandate period: the process was well
advanced by the start of the First World War. 45 What distinguishes the
mandate period are, first, the ever greater extension of an increasingly effec-
tive state’s authority to regions beyond the main towns, their hinterlands and
major routes of communication; and, second, the new state-form within which
that expansion was taking place. Like the other European dynastic empires

Separatism and Autonomism

[87

in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had, with a greater or lesser
degree of success, developed some of the characteristics of a nation-state -
characteristics which are closely connected to the development of a modern
state apparatus. But its successor state, though under colonial rule, was recog-
nised as a territorial nation-state from the off. Moreover, it comprised a fairly
compact territory whose population, though diverse, was much less so than
that of the empire. Within this territory, nationalism became a more appeal-
ing ideology for political mobilisation: it became more plausible (though not
unproblematic) to associate the state with one particular cultural identity.
The territory also had a new capital, Damascus. The city’s status as such
was neither a foregone conclusion nor undisputed, but it was reinforced by
the mere fact that the Syrian government and bureaucracy were seated there:
for populations across the territory, engaging with the central government,
whether in support or in opposition, now meant engaging with Damascus.
Although bilad al-Sbam was now divided into several states, the bureaucracy
across the French-controlled territories, Tebanon excepted, was subordinated
to Damascus, whereas in the Ottoman period the same territory was divided
between the three provincial capitals of Aleppo, Beirut and Damascus. The
presence of the High Commission as a ‘higher authority’ nuances this picture
for the areas with autonomous or other special status, but a countervailing
force was the presence across the territory - even in those areas - of national-
ists who tended increasingly to treat Damascus as the natural capital of Syria. 46

The same expansion of state authority that, in the context of an increas-
ingly ‘national’ state, helped to create a national territory in Syria also helps to
explain autonomist mobilisations and the shape they took. Populations may
resent the greater intrusions of the modern state into their lives, especially when
they are faced with that intrusion for the first time rather than being socialised
into it from birth: ‘ Scappa , che arriva la patria’, said the Italian peasant mother
to her son - ‘Scarper, the fatherland’s coming’. 47 But they are not blind to the
opportunities that it offers alongside the inconveniences, an eye for opportu-
nity that is not restricted to groups that already have some independent social
or political status, though it may be most developed among them.

Thus, a striking aspect of the demands presented by autonomist mobilisa-
tions is their preoccupation with concrete issues relating to the interaction
between local populations and the state - so much so that these demands give
us a good picture, in imprint, of what that material expansion entailed. Here
I will argue that the expansion of state authority should be seen as at least
as important a spur to autonomist mobilisations as identitarian feeling. The
two factors should not necessarily be separated, but it is useful to distinguish
between them - and to question the direction of the relationship between them.

Autonomist demands were indeed frequently, though not always, expressed
in identitarian terms. One example among countless others is a petition sent
to the French authorities by ‘Alawis in the caza of Masyaf in 1933 (another

88 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

year of treaty negotiations, abortive in this case) which demanded the contin-
ued autonomy of the Alaouites. 48 The preamble warned of the threat posed to
‘Alawis by Sunnis - it being taken for granted that the nationalist movement
was a purely Sunni affair:

Considering that the exploitation by the Sunnis of every opportunity to destroy the
‘Alawis [li-hadm kiyan al- ‘ alaiuiyyln] indicates that this community [nmma\ imbued
with a spirit of religious fanaticism [rub al-ta ‘assub al-dini] . . . cannot be entrusted
with a people like ours, separated from them by innumerable monstrosities recorded
by history from a thousand years ago up to today. It would be unjust to abandon
us as victims in the hands of a majority whose nails are still tainted with our blood,
and whose religious leaders’ decisions - which authorize massacring us [tnhallil
taqtilana ], raping our women, pillaging our possessions - are attested [ muthbata ] in
their religious books, read and studied and transmitted from father to son . 49

The list of demands which follows this, however, is rather more concrete
than a mere assertion of communal difference. It protests Sunni mistreatment
of ‘Alawis and demands the independence of the Alaouites; but it also, more
specifically, requests that government jobs be distributed in proportion to the
number of ‘Alawis, and rejects any court not composed of an ‘Alawi majority.
Other petitions submitted by ‘Alawis in the same period make similar demands
for a share of government jobs and an advantageous tax status without trou-
bling to mention the community’s precarious situation vis-a-vis the fanatical
Sunnis. A 1936 petition to the French foreign minister, meanwhile, demanded
autonomy for the Alaouites, ‘Alawi participation in public functions, a
return to the name Etat des Alaouites (the region then being known as the
Gouvernement de Lattaquie), and the banning of proselytism in the region. 50

Such specific demands are interesting. For instance, when ‘Alawis requested
an end to missionary proselytism in the Alaouites they were not making
a protest against Syrian nationalism, but against the status quo under the
French: the mandate had seen a substantial Jesuit missionary effort develop
among the ‘Alawis, causing some perturbation. Influential ‘Alawis might have
been happy to cooperate with a French presence that limited the dominance
of Sunni landlords in Latakia and pulled their region out of the orbit of the
large cities of the interior, but they did not surrender themselves entirely to the
French will: ‘Alawis were quite ready to protest when French policies threat-
ened established authority among them, even in the context of a petition whose
other articles are directed against Syrian nationalism. The very long list of sig-
natories to this petition is headed by France’s closest ally among the ‘Alawis,
‘Brahim agha El Kinj, President of the C.R. [Conseil representatif ], chief of the
Haddadine tribe’.

It is not hard to find other examples, from a number of different sources
throughout the mandate period, of autonomist mobilisations making demands

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 89

that, like these, betray a preoccupation with the expanding modern state.
There is much in common between these mobilisations, whether full ‘inde-
pendence’ from Syria is one of their demands or not. For example, in January
1926 the deputy for the caza of Salamiyya, where Syria’s small Isma'ili
community was concentrated, requested that the caza be detached from the
muhafaza of Hama and constituted ‘as an autonomous Sandjak under the
direct authority of the [ relevant directement dn] High Commission’. 51 He also
requested the formation of a 200-strong Isma'ili cavalry squadron under a
French commanding officer, but also under the authority of an Isma'ili leader.
This request was made at the height of the ‘Druze’ revolt, and justified on the
grounds that autonomy and a local military force would both serve to protect
the region from the rebels. It would be a mistake, though, to assume that the
deputy’s prime motive was hostility towards Syrian Arab nationalism. In the
early months of the revolt, the movement’s status as a nationalist mobilisa-
tion was far less clear than it would seem later, 52 and there were opportunistic
raids by Bedouin taking advantage of the precarious security situation. The
deputy seems to understand the rebellion as mere Bedouin disorder, justify-
ing his request for an Isma'ili squadron by saying that his community ‘desires
to safeguard . . . the security of its regions, ever menaced by the raids of the
Bedouin’.

As with the ‘Alawi petitioners described above, the demands of this Isma'ili
deputy fall in the domain of state authority. They illustrate the ambiguity
of the relationship between that authority and the population. Upgrading
the caza to an autonomous sanjak would presumably have entailed a larger
share of state expenditure, and an expanded local bureaucracy offering more
employment opportunities. The request for an Isma'ili squadron, meanwhile,
can be seen as residents of a relatively peripheral region 53 simultaneously
calling on and seeking to limit state authority: they request that the state
impose order on a disorderly situation, but that its locally deployed coer-
cive forces be made up of local men under the authority of a local notable.
Autonomism evidently remained significant in Salamiyya: in 1939 a petition
circulating among Isma'ilis there made the very similar request that their area
become ‘an autonomous Muhafaza directly subordinate to French authority’,
and was said to have gained 1,500 signatures. 54

A similar demand was presented to the High Commission in 1927 by ‘the
Tcherkess’: that is, by certain Circassians claiming to represent their com-
munity, another fairly small community concentrated particularly (but not
exclusively) in a single caza, Qunaytra. 55 In that year the High Commission
received a request for the caza to become a sanjak, ‘with only Tcherkess func-
tionaries’. 56 By 1933, the year of failed Franco-Syrian treaty negotiations, a
document signed by Circassian notables, religious leaders and second-degree
electors made autonomist demands on the grounds that the Circassians
were a national minority and should be officially recognised as such in the

90 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

treaty. Their ten demands were for: guaranteed representation in parliament;
Circassian officials in Circassian areas; recognition of the rights of Circassian
civil and military functionaries; Circassian-medium teaching in Circassian
primary schools; scholarships for Circassian students at secondary level and
above; Circassian control of Circassian schools; freedom to publish in the
Circassian language; free association on a minority basis; participation in
waqfs; and the right of ‘Circassian religious leaders’ to conduct marriages fol-
lowing ‘Circassian national customs and traditions ’. 57 If Circassian identity
was emphatically the basis on which these demands were made, their focus
was equally emphatically the interaction of population and state. Again, that
relationship is ambiguous. The signatories wanted to limit the threat that the
state might pose to them by ensuring - through articles in a treaty guaranteed
by outside powers - both communal representation in national politics and
communal control over the state’s intrusions into the community’s life (educa-
tion, civil law, the bureaucracy in general). At the same time they wanted to
take advantage of the opportunities a modern state can bring, as is particularly
apparent in the demands centred on education. Demanding scholarships for
educational advancement is hardly a resounding rejection of the central state;
while demanding Circassian-medium education may simply have been a strat-
egy for gaining more and better schools. Noticeably, their demands did not
include separation from Syria.

My point here is not to argue that identitarian motivations were irrelevant
to questions of autonomism and separatism, but rather to give a more nuanced
understanding of their relevance. Cultural identities do not have an a priori
political content (or political effect): they acquire political salience in particular
conditions - and the modern state, with its unprecedented degree of control
over territory and intervention in the lives of the population, certainly creates
those conditions, as Charles Tilly has noted:

In the period of movement from tribute to tax, from indirect to direct rule, from
subordination to assimilation, states generally worked to homogenize their popula-
tions and break down their segmentation by imposing common languages, religions,
currencies, and legal systems, as well as promoting the construction of connected
systems of trade, transportation, and communication. When those standardizing
efforts threatened the very identities on which subordinate populations based their
everyday social relations, however, they often stirred massive resistance . 58

At the same time, this analysis allows for ambiguity: rather than assuming
that an expanding state will automatically provoke hostility from minorities,
it understands how that expansion may itself spur a sense of minority identity
- and also accounts for the range of options that it opens up for the com-
munities that become ‘minorities’. In the Syrian case these included outright
hostility and a desire for a separate state, with French support offering a means

Separatism and Autonomism

[9i

of going over the head of the central state; 59 a desire for autonomy, simultane-
ously limiting and taking advantage of state authority, with League of Nations
guarantees providing a weaker but still significant external source of support;
and a desire for full integration into the ‘national’ community of Syria and
the nation-state that claimed to represent it. Similar options were available to
the populations of other states during the process of state intensification and
expansion - for example, France in the ‘long’ nineteenth century to 1914. The
presence of an imperial power in Syria represents one specific variable within a
process that is generally comparable from state to state.

Many factors influenced the popularity of a particular strategy with any
given community. The point is, though, that individuals belonging to any
given community could adopt any one of these strategies, or change between
them according to circumstance. Just as important, identity could be, and
was, harnessed to any strategy. Individuals suspicious of the state or of Syrian
Arab nationalism emphasised those aspects of their identity which set them
apart from ‘Damascus’, or from a dominant community however defined.
But equally, members of ‘minority’ communities who favoured Syrian Arab
nationalism and integration within the state adopted an interpretation of
Syrian identity broad enough to include themselves. For example, in February
1933, fifteen Lebanese Shi'is from Nabatiyya wrote in support of the Syrian
National Bloc, stating that ‘Syrian Unity constitutes the wish of every Syrian
Arab. The Djebel Amel, which is purely Arab, unceasingly demands it with all
its strength.’ 60 This strategy sometimes involved a broader interpretation of
Syrian national identity than members of the linguistic or religious mainstream
might have offered, but that interpretation is no less ‘authentic’. Examples
exist of nationalists belonging to more or less every ‘minority’ community; the
case cited here is particularly telling since, coming from outside Syria, it is the
precise opposite of a separatist mobilisation.

These points about the relationship between autonomism, state authority
and ‘minority’ identity can also be demonstrated in reverse, as it were, by
considering separatist mobilisations among communities that formed part
of the mainstream on both linguistic and religious criteria - that is, Sunni
Muslim Arabic-speakers. What we might call regionalist mobilisations were
not unknown in French mandate Syria: there is evidence of such mobilisations
in Hawran and Qalamun, south and north of Damascus, respectively. If these
were not taken seriously even by the French when they emerged in the 1920s
(and the nationalist press vilified them), things were different a decade later:
under the National Bloc government of 1936-9, Hawran once again saw ‘a
move for local autonomy, with all-Hawrani officials’, which the government
sought not to repress but to accommodate by traditional methods: ‘postpone-
ment of taxes due, remissions of sentences, and the removal of the unpopular
Muhafidh’. 61

5 >2 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

An even better example opened this chapter, and we return to it in more
detail now. It should be stressed that the case comes not from the archives of
the French High Commission, which had every reason to overstate the impor-
tance of autonomist mobilisations, but from the archives of the Syrian admin-
istration at a time when it was under nationalist control and had every reason
to understate them.

When the governor of the Euphrates wrote in concern to the Syrian
interior ministry, in the spring of 1939, the National Bloc government was
discredited and vulnerable, and the political situation across the country
was tense. The ‘separatist propaganda’ [ da‘wa infisdliyya]’ 61 in Dayr al-Zur
was therefore worrying. What the official feared was a campaign for the
governorate to become, not a separate state, but part of Iraq. As he pointed
out, the local people were culturally close to their Iraqi neighbours; their ‘par-
ticular inclination [may l khdss]’ towards the country was reinforced by ‘their
close communication with it’ - and their sense of both ‘the spread of civilisa-
tion there’ and ‘evidence of [its] independence’. This feeling of closeness had
inspired widespread mourning upon the death of Iraq’s King Ghazi I: on the
Friday after the monarch’s death the preachers in the town’s great mosque
had all called for the city’s ‘attachment to Iraq’. One of them had ‘gone so
far . . . as to say that the Euphrates considers itself part of Iraq’ - this was
the man who said that the region did not recognise the Syrian government
or president. It was on such propaganda that the governor blamed growing
hostility towards the Syrian government and its employees, especially those
from outside the region.

As we have already seen, the population of Dayr al-Zur was almost wholly
Arabic-speaking and Sunni Muslim - part of the ‘majority’. Yet the similarity
with autonomist mobilisations among ‘minority’ populations is marked, even
looking at the situation there through the eyes of a nationalist functionary.
The hostility towards the central government, and the preference for local
people in the local bureaucracy, is the same; the governor himself raised the
question of cultural identity, in the reference to ‘characteristics and customs’.
There are also clearly underlying material and political causes: Iraq seemed
prosperous and independent relative to a Syria whose subordination to French
rule was only increasing, while it was hardly unreasonable for inhabitants of
the Euphrates valley to feel a closer connection to cities downriver than to
Damascus, hundreds of kilometres away across the desert. Their attitude at
this stage shows that neither a national territory nor a coherent majority can
be taken for granted as simply having existed in Syria under the mandate
(just as these things cannot be taken for granted anywhere else). Like other
separatist mobilisations, this one instead draws our attention to the historical
processes that made a national territory and allowed a coherent majority to
form within it - developments that are always contingent. The governor’s sug-
gestions for curing the problem of ‘separatism’, meanwhile, shed a revealing

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 93

light on the relationship between the expanding state bureaucracy of which he
was a part and the populations of Syria beyond the main cities. He conceived
of his governorate as unquestionably part of a Syrian national territory - but
this is taken for granted, not explicitly stated. His conception of the national
community was vaguer still, and we will see in a moment that the place within
it of the people under his administration was uncertain too. His attitudes bear
comparison with those of the nationalist journalists we encountered in the first
part of the chapter. What comes through most clearly is neither a conception
of a national territory nor an imagined national community, but a concern for
state power.

It is noteworthy that the governor made no positive case, on either mate-
rial or ideological grounds, for the Euphrates region to remain a part of Syria.
He did not choose to argue for a connection with Damascus, or against one
with Iraq. Instead, he concentrated on the practical business of shoring up
the Syrian state’s authority over a population that he did not describe as
fellow members of a Syrian nation (however defined), but rather in terms that
closely resemble those of French officials describing the colonised population.
‘Although the people as a whole remain primitive’, he wrote, ‘and the tribal
inclination (in which there is something of the roughness of the Bedouin) pre-
vails over them, nevertheless they are quick to yield \san‘u al-inqiyad] before
strength’. The High Commissioner’s delegate in Dayr al-Zur was apparently
keen for the French army to take responsibility for maintaining order, which,
as the governor noted, would further undermine the Syrian government’s
authority there. He therefore suggested increasing the local police force by
at least ten men, a significant increase in a force which at the time of writing
numbered only twenty-eight. Accounting for men on leave or on duty outside
the city, at any one time there were only twenty policemen in a town of 60,000
inhabitants, ‘and this is a very weak proportion’. 63 He recommended replacing
the police chief, on whom he could no longer rely; he also pointed out that
many members of the force were from the local population and linked to it
by bonds of family and tribe. He evidently viewed this as a problem for the
stability of state control, and argued that the new police chief should be free to
replace them as necessary.

Of the various nationalist conceptions of the state’s relationship to popula-
tion and territory outlined in the first part of this chapter, this vision is closest
to that of Nasuh Babil writing in al-Ayyam. It is striking that as far as the
governor was concerned, the only way to ensure the state’s authority was to
reinforce its coercive power: more policemen, more firmly subordinated to the
central state. He suggested no non-coercive ways of countering the separatist
current, for example by bringing local people into the state apparatus; indeed,
he saw the latter as a problem, not a solution. In this understanding, the only
thing linking the state to the region and its population was the state’s ability
to impose its coercive power. As responses to such coercion, autonomism and

94 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

separatism no doubt had their attractions - just as nationalism did in response
to imperialist coercion.

Conclusion

This chapter has used a discussion of separatist and autonomist mobilisations
to investigate the relationship between state, population and territory in the
era of nation-states. If examined critically, the question of separatism enables
us to see how authority over territory was established both in rhetoric and in
practice, without confusing the two. In rhetoric, it becomes apparent that the
notion of separatism served as a tool for persuading a nationalist audience
that a national territory existed, and at times for marking out the bounds of a
national community within it. In practice, charting the development of separa-
tism helps us understand both the progress and the limits of the expansion of
state authority.

Rethinking separatism in this way also undermines any automatic associa-
tion of the phenomenon with ‘minorities’. In Part I of this book I argued that
minorities are created by the extension of the state’s control over, and claims
upon, both population and territory: a phenomenon that is characteristic of
the modern period, the age of the nation-state. In the modern period, there
is a strong case to be made for this same expansion of state authority as the
primary motivation for separatism: the desire to separate from a state can arise
only in response to a state. There is, therefore, a connection between minority
identities and separatist feeling. But it is not a precise correlation, still less a
self-evidently causative connection. Separatism as a political agenda is open
to members of minorities only in certain conditions. These might include the
existence of a substantial and concentrated minority population (that largely
shares both the sense of minority identity and the desire for separation); the
existence of a neighbouring state whose national majority belongs to the com-
munity that is a minority on this side of the border; substantial minorities
sharing the same identity in adjacent areas of a neighbouring state or states;
or the presence of another external actor willing to support the separatist
minority at the expense of the state and its national majority. Where such
conditions do not obtain, any autonomist agenda developed by members of
minorities is likely to fall short of full separatism. When the state’s institutions
are flexible enough to permit the expression of minorities’ political aspira-
tions and cultural identity alongside those of the majority, autonomism is
likely to be minimal or non-existent; indeed, in such situations, communities
objectively definable as ‘minorities’ may well not consider themselves as such.
None of these outcomes is inevitable or permanent: they depend on prevailing
conditions, just as a particular community’s status as a ‘minority’ is neither
primordial nor unchanging.

Finally, as we saw, neither autonomism nor separatism are limited to

Separatism and Autonomism

[95

minority communities. These agendas can, and do, also appear among
populations which objectively form part of the majority, which supports the
argument that the expansion of the state is the primary spur to separatism . 64
Minority identity - itself spurred by state expansion - is a secondary cause.
Indeed, in some cases separatism creates, or attempts to create, a sense of
minority identity rather than vice versa. Separatist and autonomist mobilisa-
tions among the majority, often on regionalist or city lines, demonstrate that it
is a mistake to assume the existence of national feeling among the community
claimed by nationalists as the ‘majority’; unionist, nationalist activism among
the ‘minority’ populations of administratively separated areas demonstrate
that minorities are not monolithic either.

These observations all refer directly to the foregoing discussion of cases
in Syria under the French mandate. More generally, however, they should
also serve for comparative purposes in a world that is organised into nation-
states, where separatist movements, autonomist movements and minorities are
permanent features of state politics.

Notes

1. All quotes from MWT, wathaiq al-daivla, sijill 2; 1 vizarat al-dcikhiliyya. 44/5409:
handwritten letter from governor of al-Furat to ministry of interior (13/4/1939).
The document is discussed in more detail below.

2. See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections
and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), ch. 7, especially pp. 247-9, on the
rise of the territorialised state.

3. See, e.g., Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks.

4. There is a substantial literature on the development of Arab nationalism in the late
Ottoman period, (too) much of it influenced by Antonius 1938, which created a
paradigm for understanding Arab nationalism that was still evident at the pub-
lication of Khalidi et al. 1991. This paradigm has tended to concentrate on the
ideology of nationalism rather than, e.g., its social origins: see criticisms voiced by
James Gelvin (review of Rashid Khalidi et al.. The Origins of Arab Nationalism,
in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (1993), 20(1): 100-2) and Edmund
Burke (‘Orientalism and world history: representing Middle Eastern nationalism
and Islamism in the twentieth century’, Theory and Society (1998), 27(4): 489-
507). The precise nature of Arab nationalism’s territorial claims, and how those
claims were circulated, put into practice and contested in relation to local popula-
tions (as opposed to imperial powers) form one neglected aspect of the question.

5. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, pp. 150-68.

6. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, pp. 158-9.

7. Peter Sluglett, ‘Will the real nationalists stand up? The political activities of
the notables of Aleppo, 1918-1946’, in Meouchy (ed.). Trance, Syrie et Liban,
pp. 273-90, quote at 274, n. 2.

96 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

8 . See Chapter 4.

9. My use of this term is explained in the Introduction.

10. This and following quotes from Alif BcV, 19 April 1923: al-ittihcid wal-infsdl
aydan (Federation and separation too).

11. AD-SL Box 413, dossier LE DJEBEL DRUZE ET L’UNITE SYRIENNE, sub-
dossier UNITE SYRIENNE - djebel druze [sic]. Undated translation of state-
ment to Damascus Delegation, forwarded to Meyrier, secretary-general of High
Commission (21/7/1936).

12. AD-SL Box 410, untitled dossier, translation of telegram (No. 724) to HC
for transmission to French president, League of Nations and other recipients;
signed Abboud Ahmed, Ahmed El Kheir, Boulos Dibe and twenty-nine others
(25/2/1936). This is a useful reminder of the undoubted significance of French
involvement.

13. For one example among many, see AD-SL Box 413, dossier LE DJEBEL DRUZE
ET L’UNITE SYRIENNE, subdossier Requite de chefs religieux druzes en faveur
de I’autonomie du Djebel Druze. Requite addressee d Son Excellence Leon Blum
(16/6/1936), signed by the three Druze religious leaders, Ahmed El-Hijri, Ahmed
Jarbou and Ali El-Hennaoui (names as in original): ‘the crushing majority of
chiefs, notables, and peasants agree with separation. There is no reason to take
into account the words of certain individuals who demand Syrian unity in a [self-]
interested aim’. In box 410, untitled dossier, a duplicate of an intelligence service
Information (unnumbered and undated, because a duplicate; a/s Visite de Mgr.
Abed) reports a Maronite monsignor in the Alaouites stating that only 2 out of the
7,000 Maronites there were pro-unity. Abed named them as Faiez Elias and Boulos
Dibe - the latter being a signatory to the Unitarian petition described above.

14. Al-wabda al-siiriyya wal-siyada al-wataniyya. Hal ya’udun fi mufawadatihim ila
al-wara ?! 12 February 1933. Reprinted in Najib al-Rayyis, Suriyyat al-intiddb
(1928-1936) (London: Riad el-Rayyes, 1994), pp. 539-43.

15. Yusuf al-Hakim, Siiriyya wal-intidab al-faransT. See pp. 166-9 for Alexandretta,
pp. 250 and 260 for ‘Alawi region, p. 283 for Ataturk.

16. Cf. Robb, The Discovery of France, pp. 257-8, on ‘Napoleonville’ (La-Roche-sur-
Yon) in post-revolutionary Vendee.

17. See Chapter 4.

18. Alif Ba, 1 September 1932: Id baraka infisdliyya fil-Jazira. fitnat al-Jazira wa
asbdbuba, and al-Ayyam, 8 September 1932: al-infisdliyyiin al-mutamarridun . . .
hal yakhluqiin bukiima jadida ‘sddisa’ fi Siiriyya.

19. This and subsequent quotes from Alif Bd’, 1 September 1932.

20. Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 73-7.

21. This and subsequent quotes from al-Ayydm, 8 September 1932.

22. This does not imply that Babil’s politics were Islamist, merely that his frame of
reference was explicitly Islamic.

23. In an article on the same subject a few weeks earlier, entitled ‘The plot to detach

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 97

the Upper Jazira: how the Kurdish-Armenian homeland was devised [mu’amarat
fast al-Jazira al-‘Ulya. kayfa dubbir al-watan al-kurdT al-armani]’ (29 July 1932),
the newspaper had referred to the inhabitants of the region as dnkhala. The word
means ‘newcomers’ or ‘[incoming] foreigners’.

24. Hukuma should be understood in the wider sense of the apparatus of government
as well as in the narrower sense of the ruling political authority.

25. This is a plausible assumption rather than an established fact: see note on press
sources in Introduction. Newspapers were no doubt also a means of addressing the
mandatory authorities.

26. The terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ can also be understood in a more than merely
geographic sense, e.g., to refer to culturally or economically peripheral groups.

27. This idea may be expressed even more clearly by the Arabic term infisdliyya than
by the English term separatism, since the Arabic term derives from the verbal noun
infisdl, ‘[act of] separation’, while the English derives from the adjective ‘separate’,
which describes a state. A translation capturing this somewhat more ‘active’ sense
might be ‘secessionism’.

28. Seale, Asad, pp. 4-5

29. ‘Abdallah TIanna, ‘Pour ou contre le mandat fran^ais. Reflexions fondees sur des
enquetes de terrain’, Meouchy (ed.), France, Syrie et Liban, pp. 181-8, quote at
186. A clumsier but more literal translation of this phrase (sdr ft dawla) would be
that in French times ‘there came to be a state’.

30. Manu Goswami ascribes this analytical failure to ‘methodological nationalism’:
‘the common practice of presupposing, rather than examining, the sociohistori-
cal production of such categories as a national space and a national economy’.
Producing India. From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 4.

31. Seale, Asad, pp. 14-16. Such terms are common in the literature.

32. Seale, Asad, p. 14. Aleppo’s population was substantially larger and its political
and economic weight within the empire was greater: see Sluglett, ‘Will the real
nationalists stand up?’. In earlier periods Aleppo was not considered part of bilcid
al-Shdm at all, as Thomas Pierret pointed out to me.

33. I think it is safe to say that these newspapers assumed the reader would be
‘himself’.

34. This does not mean that that territory did not exist in the minds of the authors
of these texts. Their belief in it was no doubt thoroughly internalised, even
sincere.

35. The theoretical and empirical literature on the expansion of the state in the modern
period is immense. Works which have influenced my own thinking in this respect
include Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts. Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity
(London: University of California Press, 2002); Scott, Seeing like a State; Stone,
Europe Transformed; Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States.

36. On the symbolic importance for nationalism of maps, see Anderson, Imagined
Communities, ch. 10. On the physical process of mapping a national territory,

9 8 J

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

and its significance, see Scott, Seeing like a State , and the relevant case study in
Mitchell, Rule of Experts, introduction and ch. 3.

37. See, e.g., text of Decree 243/LR (18/10/1934) restricting the making and export of
cinematographic images in the mandate territories. MWT, wathaiq al-daivla, sijill
1; qadaya mukhtalifa, 47/1148.

38. MWT, watha’iq al-dawla, sijill 1, qadaya mukhtalifa-. for Hasaka, 67/1168 (gov-
ernor of Jazira to ministry of interior, 3/2/1939 (misdated: in fact 3/3/1939)); for
Qamishli, 70/1171 (qa’immaqam of Qamishli to governor of Jazira, 3/3/1939).

39. Three in Homs in January (MWT, wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 1; idrabat, 7/613 and
11/617), one in Dayr al-Zur in January (same sijill; idrcibat, 4/610), one in Dar'a
in March (same sijill; hawadith, 14/794), one in Hasaka in January (same sijill;
qadaya mukhtalifa, 63/1164).

40. Souheil Chebat informed me that demonstrations of students in Damascus often
began at the Tajhiz then filed past, and drew support from, schools belonging
to religious communities (see Chapter 6). This was the pattern followed by the
student demonstration in Homs described in 11/617 above.

41. Around the same time, twelve Bloc members in ‘Afrin - another small town - tel-
egraphed the ministry of the interior to protest that local employees of the French
authorities had threatened them with prison if they did not raise only French
flags the next day. ‘The nation’, they wrote, ‘firmly united behind the decisions of
the National Bloc, protests strongly against these measures.’ MWT, wathaiq al-
dawla, sijill 1; idrcibat, 12/618 (7/2/1939).

42. The word ‘Syrian’ here comes from the Arabic suriyanl. ‘Syrian Catholic’ is one
translation for the name of this church; since there were other Catholics in Syria, I
have used ‘Syrian-Catholic’, to specify this church and its members. ‘Syriac’ is also
used.

43. MWT, wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 1; qadciyci mukhtalifa, 63/1164. Governor of Jazira
to ministry of interior (23/1/1939).

44. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, ch. 3 gives information about the small
number of French officers and officials in the mandate territories, who were con-
centrated in Beirut. The Syrian state they oversaw, however, and information
about its functionaries (especially below the upper ranks), are striking absences in
this monumental work.

45. See the articles collected in Philipp and Schaebler (eds), The Syrian Land.

46. For anti-nationalists it was common to go ‘over the head’ of Damascus and directly
address the High Commission in Beirut, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris
and/or the League of Nations in Geneva. But, on the other hand, nationalists
addressed these three institutions in order to endorse Damascus’s status as capital
of Syria.

47. Quoted, from F. Jovine, in E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914
(London: Weidenfeld &; Nicolson, 1987), p. 142.

48. Autonomist petitions seem to have been addressed to the High Commission or the
League of Nations more often than the Syrian government.

Separatism and Autonomism

[ 99

49. AD-SL Box 414, dossier LES ALAOUITES ET L’UNITE SYRIENNE (hand-
written: 1933-1936), petition from ‘Alawis of al-Haffa (in French ‘Haffe’) caza,
7/2/1933. My translation is based on the original, verified against a French transla-
tion also present. An identical text from the caza of Massyaf (Masyaf) with a dif-
ferent list of signatories is present only in French translation.

50. AD-SL Box 410, untitled dossier, petition to MAE (25/2/1936), signed el Kinj et al.

51. This and following quote from AD-SL Box 414, dossier MOUVEMENT
AUTONOMISTE, subdossier Menees Separatistes. Generalites. Traduction
resumee of a request to HC, from ‘Le Chef de la Communaute des Islamailies et
depute du Caza de Salimie: S ./. Tamer . . . (Illisible)’.

52. When it began, nationalist newspapers in Damascus were by no means uniformly
favourable to this rural uprising among a backward community. See the Revues de
la Presse de Damas for July-September 1925 in AD-SL Box 1727, bound volume
avril-decembre 1925.

53. If Salamiyya is considerably less ‘peripheral’ than the Jazira or even the Alaouites
in this period, its position away from the large towns towards the edge of the
settled agricultural zone of western Syria means the term is still applicable. See
Norman Lewis, Nomads and Settlers in Syria and Jordan, 1800-1980 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 58-67.

54. AD-SL Box 414, dossier MOUVEMENT AUTONOMISTE, subdossier
Mouvement autonomiste Djebel Dmze (evidently misfiled). Information No 481
(20/1/1 939).

55. Both Circassien and Tcherkess exist in French; I am using ‘Circassian’ uniformly
in my text, but ‘Tcherkess’ in direct quotes from French sources where that word
rather than Circassien is used.

56. AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, ‘Demandes presentees au Flaut-Commissaire
par les Tcherkess’ (5/1/1927). These had been received no later than December
1926.

57. AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, petition from Circassians in Qunaytra, Homs,
Hama and Marj Sultan to High Commission for forwarding to League of Nations
(1/4/1933). This was probably the petition reported to be circulating in Homs a
couple of weeks earlier: AD-SL Box 620, dossier Mouvement minoritaire Chretien,
subdossier La question des minorites en Syrie et en Irak (Generalites - correspon-
dances - informations) . Information No 1203 (18/3/1933). See also Chapter 5.

58. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, p. 100.

59. While imposing different limits, set by French imperial strategy, which, e.g., had
no intention of allowing the Kurds to establish a state on territories under French
mandate (see Chapters 2 and 4).

60. Box 410, dossier B13 (1933) Rattachement des Alaouites a la Syrie, telegram to
Hashim al-Atasi and Ibrahim Hananu (17/2/1933).

61. Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. 246. A digest of press reports on the Hawrani
separatist movement immediately prior to the great revolt can be found in AD-SL
Box 1727, bound volume avril-decembre 1925, Revue de la presse de Damas du

100

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

15 Juillet 1925 (18P/7/1925). Material on separatism in the Jabal Qalamun can be
found in AD-SL Box 414, dossier MOUVEMENT AUTONOMISTE, subdossier
Mouvement Separatiste Damas.

62. This and following quotes from MWT, watha’iq al-dawla , sijill 2; wizdrat
al-dakhiliyya. 44/5409: handwritten letter from governor of al-Furat to ministry of
interior (13/4/1939).

63. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 11, based on several different sources,
gives Dayr’s population as only 33,716 in 1936, but as 61,139 in 1943.

64. For examples from revolutionary France, see Tilly, Coercion, Capital and
European States, p. 113.

CHAPTER

4

THE BORDERAND THE KURDS

Introduction

In the spring of 1939, the French High Commissioner planned a visit to the
Jazira. 1 So nationalists in Qamishli asked the beleaguered National Bloc gov-
ernment to send them Syrian flags, and flagpoles to hang them on during his
visit. They wanted ‘to show their sound nationalist feeling’, and demonstrate
this turbulent region’s loyalty to Damascus. But hostility to Damascus was
strong there, too, and when the flags arrived at the local railway station a
group of anti-nationalists tried to intercept them. The stationmaster at first
refused to give the flags to anyone other than the addressee, and with seventy
armed nationalist youths guarding them, the anti-nationalists hesitated to
press him. It was only when they returned with a detachment of Circassian
troops sent by the local French officer that the stationmaster was persuaded to
relinquish the packets containing the flags. ‘Then’, wrote the Minister of the
Interior, ‘they opened them near the municipal offices [dd’irat al-baladiyya]
and burned them before a crowd of people, and carried out acts of the basest
kind [abndl sdfila lil-ghdya].’ The qa’immaqam of Qamishli was more specific.
One Dawud ‘Aziz Hana ‘donated a Syrian pound from his own pocket to
whoever would urinate on the Syrian flags after burning them, and indeed paid
the Syrian pound to one of the rabble [sbakbs min aivbdsb al-nds]’, since the
latter did just that. 2

There are many interesting things about this incident, but one thing is inter-
esting by its absence: the Syrian-Turkish border. Qamishli was a border town,
and the recently-drawn border ran just south of the railway line. So the local
station was in Nusaybin, less than a mile away on the Turkish side, and the
reluctant stationmaster was a Turkish state employee. But the documents relat-
ing these events nowhere mention the border, even though they describe two

[ ioi ]

102 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

mutually antagonistic groups of Syrians, at least some of them armed, strolling
onto Turkish territory for a stand-off that involved one of them - backed by
French military force - pressurising a Turkish official. If any of those involved
faced any hindrance at the border, or indeed surveillance, it is not mentioned . 3
The border might as well not have existed.

Ostensibly, historians of the Middle East have been much preoccupied with
borders. The artificiality or otherwise of the region’s modern frontiers is a
staple of scholarship: how they were drawn by the colonial powers (‘Winston’s
hiccup’); the consequences for state stability and legitimacy . 4 Disputes that
affected the route of particular borders are well studied: works on the
Alexandretta crisis could fill a bookshelf, works on Israel’s wars a library. But
the border itself has often been taken for granted, perhaps because - like so
many other phenomena related to the development of modern states - borders
now have such a strong presence in the collective psyche that they are taken
as part of the natural order of things, seeming to need no explanation . 5 Philip
Khoury notes, quite accurately, that the Syrian-Turkish border cut Aleppo
off from its natural hinterland; but how ? 6 Jean Perez states, of the mandate
period, that the transhumant pastoralism of the Bedouin of the Syrian desert
led them to ‘make a mockery of frontiers [se jouer des frontieres]’ , as if the
frontiers had been there before the Bedouin arrived . 7 It would be truer to say
that the region’s borders - lines drawn very recently on a map that would itself
have been quite useless to the nomads concerned - se jouaient des Bedouins.
Even scholarship whose professed subject is a border, such as Eliezer Tauber’s
article on the determination of borders between Syria and Iraq , 8 can offer a
perfectly sound and thoughtful account of how a particular border came to
follow a particular route without asking either the question of what the border
actually was - how it was delineated, both concretely and institutionally - or
the rather more difficult question of what it meant: how the border’s concrete
and institutional existence served to constitute the territory of the states con-
cerned, how borders relate to state authority, how they affect populations
whether resident close to or far from them.

In one sense the importance of borders to the subject of this book is quite
obvious: it is the delineation of a nation-state’s borders that decides who, in
that state, is going to be a majority and who a minority. The point is too pes-
simistic: not all nation-states are condemned to a zero-sum struggle between
different groups among the population. More important, it is misleadingly
obvious, assuming the existence and coherence of the groups involved from the
outset. I will be arguing, instead, that majority and minorities are constituted
in relation to the state through the process of its establishment, including the
drawing of its borders. And it offers a fairly unproblematic view of the border,
concentrating on the effect of different groups arguing over where a par-
ticular border should run without examining how the establishment of fixed,

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[ 103

nation-state borders is a constitutive process in the making of modern states’
authority and ‘identity’.

In this chapter I try to draw out the complexities in both areas: how borders
define minorities (and a majority), and how borders are related to state author-
ity. The chapter continues my analysis of the relationship between state author-
ity, territory, population and identity. The first part of the chapter asks what
material presence Syria’s new borders had in the mandate period: that is, how
the state’s authority was manifested concretely at its boundaries. The second
part examines the relationship between the border and state authority across
the whole territory and population through the lens of the ‘Kurdish question’
that arose in the region after the First World War as nation-states replaced the
Ottoman Empire. This section concentrates on the Syrian-Turkish border in
the mid- to late 1920s, when that border was (gradually) created. The final
section shows how the drawing of Syria’s borders came to ‘minoritise’ all
Kurds resident in the country.

The Border’s Physical Presence (or Absence)

The example that opened this chapter suggests that there was no actual
‘border’ between Syria and Turkey at Qamishli in 1939, and the point holds
for long stretches of Syria’s borders throughout the mandate period. Tauber’s
article shows that the zones under the control of Faysali Syria, on the one hand,
and British-occupied Iraq, on the other, were defined not by a contest over a
particular line, but by a contest for control of certain towns and villages (and
their respective gendarme posts and government buildings 9 ) across a swathe of
disputed territory. In this situation, the term ‘crossing the border’ was literally
meaningless: the border had no material presence, nor was its location agreed
by the two jurisdictions it was supposed to separate. Moreover, insofar as
Syria’s borders did ‘solidify’ in this period, it was more as demarcation lines
between two mutually recognising jurisdictions than in any material sense of
lines marked by a physical barrier or permanent surveillance. The fences and
watchtowers that mark the Syrian-Turkish border today are for the most part
far more recent (1970s), while Syria’s long desert frontier with Iraq was largely
unmarked on the ground until the aftermath of the US invasion of 2003. 10

After the First World War, the border between the two new states of Syria
and Turkey remained uncertain for several years, into the 1920s, when the
Ankara government in Turkey and the French occupation authorities in Syria
fought a war over where it should lie. Neither jurisdiction recognised the other:
French troops briefly occupied a large area claimed by the Ankara government,
which in turn sent armed bands deep into French territory and supported
anti-French activities in Syria. 11 With the Franklin-Bouillon Agreement of
1921, France and the Republic of Turkey stopped fighting and formally rec-
ognised each other, agreeing a border between Turkish and French mandate

104 J T/;e Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

territories that was confirmed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. But the
border remained very loosely defined: the Lausanne treaty established a joint
border delineation committee to fix its exact route on the ground, but the job
took years. 12

This was partly because it was a large and complex task. But both states
were also weak along this particular edge - especially the mandatory state.
In northeastern Syria, for example, the French only established a semblance
of permanent authority in May 1926, with two posts totalling sixty soldiers
established at Darbisiyya and ‘Amuda. ‘Their presence did not modify the
general physiognomy of this region, whose principal feature continued to be a
profound anarchy.’ 13 The installation of more, larger military posts, notably at
Qamishli from 1926, seated French authority more firmly in the western part
of the ‘Bee de Canard’, the panhandle of Syrian territory extending towards
the Tigris with Turkey to the north and Iraq to the south; but troop move-
ments further east were limited. When a diplomatic protocol of 1929 agreed
the precise border in this zone, there were four French and six Turkish military
posts between Nusaybin and the Tigris - but the haziness of the border hith-
erto can be gauged from the fact that four of the Turkish posts were in Syrian
territory, well to the south of the agreed border. 14 (Charles de Gaulle was an
officer with the French detachment that finally reached the Tigris in June 1930.
‘I went with the general’, he wrote to his father, ‘and we dipped our hands in
the river, not without some emotion.’ 15 ) Whether the border represented any
kind of real barrier even after that, though, is dubious: in August 1930, for
example, the exiled Kurdish leader Hajo Agha was able to lead an abortive
armed incursion across the border onto Turkish territory. 16

Nor was it only in the furthest northeastern reaches of Syria that the border
was ill-defined and state authority hazy. In April 1934, the qa’immaqam of
the Kurd Dagh, Khayri Rida, made an inspection tour of his caza, a region
of limestone hills lying between Aleppo and Antioch. His report begins by
noting the ease with which armed bands - especially one led by ‘the famous
‘Ali Karu al-Shiqqi’ - were slipping across the border at night ‘to carry out
acts of robbery, plunder, and murder against the persons and properties of
Syrian subjects’, then returning with the takings to their safe refuge in a
Turkish village. 17 With the caza’s gendarme chief, Rida decided to increase
patrols ‘in this sensitive spot’. But it was not just the border that was sensi-
tive. ‘Ali Karu’s gang had hiding places in at least four Syrian villages where
they could take refuge among the inhabitants. On his tour, Rida summoned
forty village chiefs and warned them against harbouring criminals, but the
incident is revealing. The Syrian state was now reaching down to village level,
but it could not take the population’s cooperation - which it needed - for
granted. Its control over the territory could be asserted by the deployment of
coercive forces, but to keep order in the face of border-crossing bandits, as
Rida told his superior in Aleppo, ‘we rely on private individuals to observe

The Border and the Kurds

[ 105

the criminals and those who dare to harbour them [and] to inform the gov-
ernment immediately’.

As this suggests, the state’s ability to secure the border depended on its
effective authority within its own territory, and vice versa. But the Syrian
state’s means in this border region were modest indeed, as the rest of Rida’s
report shows. He describes the functioning and facilities of the offices of the
chief of each nahiya or administrative district in his caza. In the nahiya of
Bulbul, Rida reported, this office (the mudmyya) was not even furnished.
‘Please’, he asked his superior, ‘if possible, assign a sofa and two wicker chairs
to this office [arju idha kdn fil-imkan takhsTs maq ‘ad wa kursiyyayn khayzurdn
li-hadhihi al-mudiriyya].’ The link between the state’s material presence on
the territory and the border would be demonstrated sharply in this very area
a few years later. One of the villages Rida visited was al-Hammam, on the
Aleppo-Alexandretta road. (He was not impressed by the mudir’s disorderly
office-keeping.) When the French ceded the sanjak to Turkey, the new border’s
winding path through the village - which brought certain valuable buildings (a
hotel, the eponymous mineral baths) and the municipal gardens into the sanjak
and out of Syria - was partly defined by the personal political loyalties of their
proprietors and partly by the fact that the pro-Turkish authorities in the sanjak
sent out a police unit and installed a police station in the village faster than
the Syrian authorities. 18 Such was the importance of the material presence of
the state that Rida sought to augment: the line of the border depended on it.
But as we saw from the flag-burning incident, even in a place where the appa-
ratus of state authority was present on both sides of the border - the towns of
Qamishli and Nusaybin, seat of a Syrian qa’immaqam and Turkish kaymakam
respectively, faced each other at a bare kilometre’s distance - as late as 1939
the border itself did not necessarily pose much of an obstacle.

The mandate period, then, witnessed a steady accretion of state authority
along the border, in the shape of military installations, bureaucratic institu-
tions and even wicker chairs (if they ever arrived). This is in line with my
argument in the previous chapter about the spread and ‘deepening’ of state
authority across the territory. Yet the border itself as a physical barrier seems
to have remained almost negligible right through the mandate period. Its real
development in this period was as a jurisdictional barrier.

The Border as a Jurisdictional Barrier, the ‘Kurdish Question’, and State
Authority on Both Sides

As mentioned above, the Franklin-Bouillon Agreement of 1921 brought
mutual recognition between the French authorities in Syria (and thus the
Syrian state too) and the new Turkish government in Ankara. Although their
common frontier remained to be precisely defined, it would now be done by
diplomatic cooperation rather than military contest. This mutual recognition

io 6 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

immediately had one important consequence for the border, in that each
side’s military forces retreated to the agreed frontier: the French left Cilicia
and Turkey reduced its support for armed bands on French territory. In other
words, the states on either side of the new border no longer transgressed it (or
at least did so more discreetly). Both the Ankara government in Turkey and
the French Fligh Commission in Syria were newly-established regimes facing
many internal and external challenges to their authority; for each government,
mutual recognition removed one important challenge and freed up men and
resources for dealing with others: war against Greece for Ankara, uprisings in
northern and western Syria for France.

These pressing but temporary political reasons that pushed France-in-Syria
and Turkey to recognise one another and agree to a common frontier were
supplemented by longer-term reasons of statecraft. The state-building project
on which each government was engaged involved building a nation-state
(albeit with greater conviction on the Turkish side 19 ), with a national territory
and fixed borders. One effect of the modern transformation of the state - as
state authority becomes theoretically uniform across the entire territory, and
modern communications permit some practical approximation of this - is that
these sharp dividing lines replace the buffer zones and indistinct frontiers of
earlier periods. Important state functions, not only related to defence, move to
the frontier: notably, monitoring and collection of customs duty moves from
strategic points within the territory to a point of entry at the border. The links
between the definition of fixed borders, on the one hand, and the development
of state authority, on the other, are multiple and complex. 20 My intention here
is to concentrate on one particular aspect of this question: how these inter-
locking developments also contributed to the emergence of ‘minorities’, with
specific reference to the Kurds.

The new Turkish state’s policy towards the Syrian border zone in the years
after the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) reflects its wider policy towards southern
and eastern Anatolia. The republic was seeking to replace Ottoman authority
in zones that had been occupied by France after the war; impose permanent
state authority across a broad swathe of territory with a culturally diverse
population; contain the opposition which this process naturally provoked;
and forestall any future challenges, including such as might be launched from
outside the national territory by groups claiming sections of it. All of this
involved the border, and Syria, because in a number of cases the populations
involved spread over (or had previously been expelled) into the mandate
territories. 21

The end of the Ottoman Empire and establishment of the Turkish Republic
had seen the almost complete elimination (by massacre, expulsion, flight
or arranged transfer) of Anatolia’s Christian populations, considered inas-
similable to the Turkish ‘nation’ in construction. Nationalist policy towards

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[ 107

non-Turkish Muslim populations, most importantly the Kurds of eastern
Anatolia, was rather different. The republic had no intention of expelling the
Kurds en masse: the aim was to incorporate them as citizens, preferably as
Turks. 22 Opposition among Kurdish elites to Ankara’s imposition of author-
ity was rooted in the challenge to their political and economic position in the
region, and expressed itself in religious terms (as opposition to secularising
reform) and in some cases as incipient Kurdish nationalism. Insofar as it there-
fore posed an existential challenge to the republican regime, armed opposition
was put down violently, those involved liable to execution or internal exile 23
- many fled across the border into Syria. Provided that they could be incor-
porated, however, the republic was not hostile to the existence of Kurds on
‘Turkish’ territory. 24 What it feared was any movement which posed the risk
of a Kurdish state on Turkish territory. This Turkish interest in Kurdish affairs
had important implications for Syria and the border.

The archives of the French High Commission contain much evidence of
the scale of unrest over the border in Kurdish areas of Turkey. During the
first major outbreak of violence, the Shaykh Sa'id revolt of 1925, 25 Turkey
received French permission to transport troops by rail from Mersin or Adana
to the affected areas (the railway line crossed French territory); 26 for several
months the French monitored their numbers, which ran into the hundreds or
even thousands per day. 27 Although this was one of the largest revolts, violence
remained endemic down to the Dersim repression of 1938 28 - and the French
in Syria paid close attention. 29 The major revolts of these years were high
points on a continuum of constant unrest, not isolated events.

That unrest was a reaction to the expansion of Turkish state authority.
Soner Cagaptay describes how the regional bureaucracy in 1930s Dersim, for
example, ‘focused on building roads, bridges, and gendarme stations through-
out the region’, 30 strengthening Ankara’s authority: local opposition focused
precisely, and vocally, on these bureaucratic and infrastructural infringements.
But by a process of feedback, opposition also contributed to the expansion of
state authority, by bringing the state into the Kurdish regions in force: 25,000
soldiers were deployed in Dersim to repress, brutally, what Ankara viewed
as a rebellion. 31 It stimulated the development of a permanent state presence.
The extension of state authority in general was tending to harden the frontier,
but the need to ‘manage’ the Kurds impelled this process in particular: partly
because this population spread beyond the borders claimed by the new repub-
lic, and partly because military repression sent Kurdish refugees - especially
insurgents and their families - into Syria. Once there, they remained politically
active and interacted with others (Syrian Kurds, other refugees, the French
authorities and Syrian Arabs) in ways that heightened the border’s significance.

For fleeing insurgents, the border’s value was clearly as a barrier beyond
which they could shelter from Turkey. Even if it was neither precisely defined
nor materially ‘there’, diplomatic accords meant that Turkey recognised

io8 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

the border as a jurisdictional limit. Thus, soon after the Shaykh Sa'id rebel-
lion began, the French Assistant Delegate for Aleppo wrote to the High
Commissioner to ‘attract [his] attention to the probable repercussion of
current events in Kurdistan on the Syrian zone of the Syro-Turkish frontier,
in large part populated ... by Kurdish tribes’, anticipating that ‘to escape the
chastisement that threatens them numerous rebels will seek refuge with their
brothers in Syria’. 32 This prediction remained accurate for years to come. But
although the border afforded them an opportunity for protection, and even a
haven from which to prepare future action against the Turkish state, once they
had crossed it the frontier also became a barrier which the republic could use
to keep them out. Both of these functions depended on, and simultaneously
stimulated, the development of state authority on the French side of the border
- not just at the border, but deep within the territory too.

At the outset of the Shaykh Sa'id rebellion, the nearby border was not pre-
cisely delineated; on the Syrian side, French authority was extremely tenuous.
Insurgents fleeing into this zone were not relying on the protection of French
troops, but on the fact that the Turkish state recognised French authority
and would not follow them there. In many cases, when insurgents arrived
and settled on ‘French’ territory they were entirely outside meaningful French
influence. The High Commissioner Henri Ponsot made this point in September
1927, in one of very many documents produced by French officers rebutting
or contesting Turkish claims that the mandatory authorities were permitting
or even assisting refugee insurgents to organise for further action on Turkish
territory. Two Kurdish leaders who provoked Turkish suspicions, Hajo Agha
and Emin Agha, ‘were installed in a part of the Syrian territory of which we
have only really taken possession since the creation, 7th August last [that is,
only weeks earlier], of the posts of Kubur el-Bid and Demir-Kapou ’. 33

French authority was weak when Kurdish insurgents first started fleeing
into this ‘French’ territory: this example shows how the need to bring the
region and the insurgents who arrived there under control stimulated the
expansion of state authority. A slightly earlier example can be cited further to
the west, where French authority was imposed earlier. In March 1925, soon
after the Shaykh Sa'id rebellion began, the High Commission ordered that a
Service de Renseignements (SR) post be established at ‘Arab Punar, another
frontier village. Its mission was to gather information on the Kurdish move-
ment and the military operations of the rebellion; to monitor the state of mind
of Kurds on the Turkish side of the frontier; and to ‘survey the attitude of the
Kurds of Syria and prevent any manifestation of solidarity’ between them and
the Turkish Kurds. All these aims are clearly linked to the events in Turkey,
though the third is equally clearly intended to forestall threats to French
authority in Syria. But achieving them, again, implied a strengthening of state
authority on the border. The post was staffed by one SR officer, assisted by
an interpreter and a platoon of gendarmerie mobile, whose tasks included

The Border and the Kurds

[ 109

carrying out surveillance missions among local tribes and ‘making frequent
patrols along the frontier’. 34 The post’s personnel - and indeed its office fur-
nishings - were to be seconded from the existing post at Jarablus, but it was to
report directly to the SR’s regional centre in Aleppo.

At its establishment, this post was intended to be temporary. But although
Jarablus was assured that it would get its typewriter back, 35 it probably
never did: an intelligence post was still functioning at ‘Arab Punar in the late
1930s. 36 The general trend was towards the development of permanent state
authority: not just military, but also bureaucratic; and not just on the frontier,
but ‘behind’ it as well. This was necessary not only for monitoring the new-
comers, but for tasks such as assessing the customs payments they would have
to pay on the flocks they brought across the border with them, if any; granting
them Syrian nationality, in some cases; and, more pressingly, disarming them
and moving them further away from the frontier. 37

This brings us back to my earlier point that from the Turkish perspective,
while the border might have created inconvenience insofar as insurgents could
escape across it, once they had done so it also served as a barrier for keeping
them out. This function depended on the development of French authority
on the other side of the frontier, without which the border was an ineffective
barrier: this explains the concern of the Turkish authorities to keep refugees
not only on the French side of the border, but far on the French side - and
monitored carefully wherever they were. But it stimulated the development
of state authority on the French side, too, because of the constant Turkish
pressure on the Fligh Commission (via officials in the border region, Turkish
diplomats in Beirut and Paris, or French diplomats in Turkey) to keep a tight
reign on Kurds and other groups in Syria who were suspected of threatening
the nervous and unstable young republic as it sought to impose state authority
on its own side of the border.

Turkey’s most pressing concern for border security was to prevent any
armed insurgents who had fled beyond it from crossing back with their guns.
To address this, in early March 1925 the Fligh Commissioner (at that point
General Sarrail) sent instructions to his personnel regarding the refugees.
Individual insurgents taking refuge among Syrian Kurdish tribes were to be
watched to ensure that they did not ‘constitute any centres of anti-Turkish
agitation’. 38 To this end, the tribes were to be carefully monitored and gen-
darme units in the area ‘reinforced if necessary’. Groups of insurgents were to
be treated differently: they ‘should be settled at a distance of at least 30 km
from the frontier’, and ‘once settled, they should be disarmed in order that
they constitute a threat neither to our own tribes nor to the Turkish popula-
tions north of the border’. Later documents sent to the Fligh Commission by
officers on the ground, or by the Fligh Commissioner to Paris, make clear that
these guidelines remained operative for years. 39 Indeed, after a Franco-Turkish
accord on ‘good neighbourliness’ ( bon voisinage ) in 1926, the ‘exclusion zone’

no ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

was extended to 50 km from the border. 40 This was still the agreed distance
in the early 1930s, when the Kurdish leader Hajo Agha - whose tribal lands
spread across the new frontier - could not return to his home village after a
failed incursion into Turkey because it was less than 50 km from the frontier. 41
(A few years later, the Turkish chair of a meeting of the League of Nations
council on the subject of Assyrian refugees from Iraq expressed his country’s
preference that these ‘victims of the world war’, if settled permanently in Syria,
be kept 100 km from the border, though 50 km would do. 42 )

Sometimes the exclusion zone was not enough, and the French authorities
expelled the person concerned from Syria entirely. In June 1925, the French
ambassador in Turkey, trying to persuade Ankara that ‘without damaging
our higher principles of humanity, every measure has been taken to make it
impossible for the persons in question to foment new disorders on Turkish
territory’, noted that another participant in the Shaykh Sa'id revolt, Edhem
Bek, had been expelled from Syria - a handwritten note to this letter suggest-
ing that the words ‘even before the Turkish request’ be added. 43 Edhem Bek
ended up in Iraq, where a newspaper recorded his disappointment with Syria:
entering it ‘thinking that it was a free and independent country’, he had found
the French authorities - their ‘higher principles’ notwithstanding - ‘ready
to cast underfoot every sentiment of humanity’, and too willing to believe
‘Turkish spies’. 44

Of course, we may doubt the effectiveness of the exclusion zone: Hajo
Agha’s incursion is just one example of a Kurdish leader passing beyond
French control. The limits of state authority were set by the available
resources. Shaykh Sa'id’s brother ‘Abd al-Rahim, upon arriving in Syria in
December 1927, was placed in obligatory residence at Dayr al-Zur, far from
the border, and his followers dispersed in the Syrian interior; 45 but around the
same time, another prominent Kurdish notable - Hajo Agha’s brother Emin
Agha, returning to Syria after an illegal trip into Turkey - was permitted to
stay much closer to the border, at Hasaka. As the High Commissioner pointed
out in a letter to the Quai d’Orsay, Hasaka was still outside the (then) 30 km
exclusion zone, and settling him there meant that

it is easier for him to find the means of existence through agricultural cooperation
with families long since settled in the country, whereas the Budget of the State of
Syria would have had to subsidize his needs had he been obliged to settle in the
capital of the Sanjak [of Dayr al-Zur ]. 46

The letter also mentions that it would have been difficult for the French ‘man
on the spot’, Captain Terrier, to prevent Emin Agha’s illegal crossing of the
border ‘since we did not yet occupy the region of Kubur-el-Bid where he had
taken refuge’.

Nonetheless, this letter asserts state authority even while admitting its

The Border and the Kurds

[in

weakness: Hasaka was considered a suitable place of residence for Emin Agha
because an SR officer and mobile garrison were stationed there, ‘permitting
easy surveillance of the refugees, which must give every guarantee to our
neighbours’ - namely, the Turks. Such surveillance could mean keeping a close
count of how many refugees were in each place, and how many weapons they
had surrendered: ‘Abd al-Rahim, for instance, was reported to have entered
Syria at Ra’s al-‘Ayn with a group of 195 refugees. When the Turkish authori-
ties requested reassurances about this group from the High Commission, the
Assistant Delegate in Dayr al-Zur pointed out that 103 of them had already
been moved away from the border, to Hasaka, where the rest ‘should join
them shortly’. Also in Hasaka were twenty-four members of another group
that had entered Syria around the same time; others had briefly been unac-
counted for, but again, even before the High Commission’s telegram arrived
they ‘were sought out and redirected by a detachment of gardes-mobiles ’ .
Meanwhile, ‘the disarmament of these refugees was proceeding as normal;
more than 70 combat rifles were already in the hands of the Hassetche
[Hasaka] SR officer’. This figure had risen to 124 by the time of writing, albeit
‘against the will of certain refugees, who sought to conceal their weapons or
make them disappear’. 47

Again, whether the French could always exert such precise control in
these regions is doubtful: we have already encountered several open or tacit
admissions of the limits of their authority. When responding to Turkish
complaints, the mandatory power had numerous reasons to overstate its own
effectiveness, starting with the desire to hush those complaints. But this is
beside the point: no state can maintain perfect surveillance and control over
its territory and population. What matters is that the state’s authority over
peripheral areas of the territory increased significantly in this period. The
border played a complex role in this process as both a causative factor and
a consequence. This role is illustrated by a report written in 1928 by a priest
named Father Poidebard, a valuable source of information on the far north-
east of the mandate territories for the French in the mid-1920s. He stated
that ‘the regroupment of the populations of upper Mesopotamia (the Syrian
Haute Djezireh and northern Iraq) that is in course will necessarily be to the
profit of the territory [that is] most quickly delimited and reorganized’. 48
The arrival of Kurds, like the arrival of Christian refugees, was part of that
‘regroupment’ - which was a consequence of the division of what was once
part of the Ottoman Empire into several different jurisdictions. But it also
caused the new borders to be more swiftly and sharply delineated, by inciting
the new states to spread their authority into the border zone. As Poidebard
put it, ‘this establishment of Kurdish and Christian refugees requires the rapid
solution of the delimitation of frontiers with Iraq and Turkey - the indispen-
sable condition for the installation of good administration, closely controlled
by the Mandatory Power’.

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

112 ]

The Border and the ‘Minoritisation’ of Syria’s Kurds

The dynamic of border creation - the delineation of the border itself and the
concomitant development of state authority behind it - meant that Kurds
who fled to Syria from Turkey got ‘stuck’ there, so to speak. They found
themselves in a state with a largely Arabic-speaking population, a develop-
ing bureaucracy centred on Damascus and other state institutions - from the
courts to the parliament - whose official language was Arabic. Especially as
the development of those institutions gathered momentum in the 1930s, and
a Syrian Arab nationalist movement more successfully asserted its claim over
them, they created a powerful logic that tended to define all Kurds within the
country - not just recent arrivals in the Jazira, but also longstanding residents
of Damascus - as a single, minority, community.

This tendency was influenced by several factors. The reader will by now be
well aware of the French preference for viewing Syrian society as a mosaic of
distinct ethnic and religious groups, and governing accordingly. In the case of
the Kurds, that view was further conditioned by the wider regional ‘Kurdish
question’. This is evident from the structure and content of the French archives:
boxes whose titles refers simply to ‘Kurds’ or ‘Kurds of Syria’ contain material
that overwhelmingly focuses either on events that might have repercussions
across the border (such as refugee Kurds organising themselves politically),
or on events across the border involving the Kurds that might have repercus-
sions within Syria (such as renewed violence creating more refugees). French
officials constantly had the wider region in mind when considering the Kurdish
populations: it was quite normal for French intelligence reports coming from
peripheral, sparsely populated bits of Syria to cite a ‘serious source’ in support
of the claim that a Kurdish nationalist committee was ‘working actively to
bring about a new Kurdish insurrection’ (plausible), and that ‘all the Kurds
of Turkey, Iraq, Persia, and even Syria would be in agreement to unleash this
movement as of next autumn’ (less plausible). 49

The French fretted that ‘the ever more powerful pressure that the Turks
are striving to apply to the Kurds of their country’ might transfer ‘the whole
Kurdish question’ onto Syria, and thus France. 50 But at the same time, they were
not unhappy to accept Kurdish immigration, as long as they could control it -
in the ‘monitor and disarm’ sense outlined above - and draw advantage from
it. Weighing up the pros and cons, in the mid-1920s, of creating an autono-
mous Kurdish zone, the senior French army officer in northern Syria came
down against such a measure, citing ‘the dangers that could result’. The first,
predictably, was ‘possible complications with Turkey’, but the second was ‘the
predominance without counterweight of the Arab element in the rest of the
State’. 51 It served French policy to keep the Kurds of the northeast within a
unitary Syrian state, where they could act as that counterweight - especially if
they were considered as one community with Kurds elsewhere in the country.

The Border and the Kurds

[ 113

But it also ensured that they were a minority within it, whereas the Druzes and
‘Alawis, for example, were not numerical minorities within their statelets.

Pressure from Turkey to restrict Kurdish activities in Syria reinforced
the High Commission’s tendency to see all Kurds as forming a single group.
Ankara was suspicious of any political activity among Kurds in Syria, tending
to assume that such activity would naturally be hostile to Turkey. But some of
the measures enacted by France in response to that pressure may, in fact, have
worked to increase a sense of shared Kurdish identity between Syria’s existing
Kurdish population and the newcomers.

Turkey had two great worries about Kurds in Syria. The first was that the
Kurdish refugees, in coordination with Syrian Kurds or other groups (including
Armenian refugees, but also anti-Kemalist Turkish exiles 52 ) might contribute
to insurrectional activity in the republic - either through direct participation
or by supplying money and weapons. This was a realistic fear. The second
was that the French authorities might grant Kurds within Syria some kind of
formal territorial autonomy that would create a very uncomfortable precedent,
even a direct threat, for Turkey. As we have seen, this was less likely. ‘It seems
very difficult for France to launch herself on a Kurdish adventure that would
encounter the hostility of England [mandatory power in Iraq] and Turkey at
the same time.’ 53 These fears, though, help to explain Turkish interest in Syria’s
Kurds. Within a developing framework of diplomatic relations with the French
government and the High Commission, Ankara sought reassurance regarding
populations it viewed as hostile.

Turkish fears were particularly acute when those populations were in the
borderlands. Suspicion of Kurds (or Armenians) animated many a cross-border
diplomatic exchange, leading to the border’s ‘hardening’ in a number of ways:
for example, when the French agreed to establish three new gendarme posts
along the border (Darbisiyya, ‘Amuda, Nusaybin) after a somewhat obscure
violent incident at Darbisiyya in 1926. Ankara immediately expressed worry,
though, about ‘the employment of Armenians or Kurdish rebels’ at the posts. 54
The French were already aware that the recruitment of Kurds or Armenians
into the security services on the frontier posed a problem: during the Shaykh
Sa'id revolt the High Commissioner’s delegate in Damascus launched an
enquiry to find out what proportion of gendarmes on the border were Kurds,
planning to transfer them away if necessary. 55

In the High Commission’s records on the Kurds for these years, complaints
from Turkey that Kurds in Syria were preparing military action against the
republic are a common feature, as are accusations that the mandatory power
was assisting such action. Following the Darbisiyya incident, the Turkish
Embassy in Paris claimed that the cross-border skirmish there was ‘the prelude
to a large-scale action directed against Turkish territory’. It accused the local
French SR officers of supporting Kurdish requests to the High Commission for
arms and ammunition, and claimed there was ‘no doubt about the preparation

1 14 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

on Syrian territory of a vast Kurdish insurrectional movement’. 56 Similar com-
plaints persisted through the inter-war years: for example, Ankara suspected
that the 1937-8 unrest in Dersim might be linked to groups in Syria, perhaps
Armenian. 57 These suspicions were not necessarily unfounded: there certainly
was Kurdish-Armenian cooperation in Syria in the mandate period, albeit
uneasy, and we have already seen that some insurgents who had taken refuge
in Syria did return to fight in Turkey. (Others returned to cut deals with the
government.) This helps us understand why Turkey concerned itself not only
with insurgent refugees near the border, but also with Kurds in the rest of
Syria. From the Shaykh Sa'id revolt onwards, there was increasing Kurdish
political organisation within Syria, notably with the Khoybun (‘Independence’)
committee founded in Lebanon in 1927. 58 This committee espoused a common
Kurdish cause for the region; closely monitored by the French, it claimed that
its activities were restricted to ‘non-political’ activities, such as raising money to
support the refugees. The French, worried ‘that the Turks might take umbrage’
at the committee’s existence, always took its claim to be non-political with a
pinch of salt, calling its stated aim of ‘saving and protecting Kurds abroad’
a ‘euphemism [which] permits a Kurdish nationalist committee to be called
“philanthropic”’. 59 At the same time, to the Turks they frequently argued that
French surveillance was tight enough to restrict the committee’s activities,
an argument that rang rather hollow after it coordinated a major uprising
in southeastern Turkey. 60 From 1928, when it was prohibited in Aleppo ‘fol-
lowing strong protests from Ankara’, 61 the committee was also an instrument
of Kurdish-Armenian cooperation, apparently channelling funds from the
internationally-active Armenian Dashnak Party to support Kurdish anti-
Turkish activism: it was through monitoring this cooperation that the French
were able to report, for example, that the Armenian company Matossian was
employing Kurdish notables as ‘money-collectors and salesmen’ in the border
zone, allowing them to carry out political activities also. 62 One of these Kurds,
Kamran ‘Ali Badr Khan, later complained to the Turkish Consul in Beirut - in
a surprisingly cordial meeting - that he had lost this job because the French
had forbidden him from travelling near the border. He also mentioned that the
French had expelled one of his brothers from Syria, and responded favourably
to ‘all the demands presented by your Government concerning measures to be
taken with regard to the Kurds’. 63

Those ‘measures to be taken’ covered a wide range of potentially Kurdish
nationalist endeavour, from military organisation to cultural affairs, through-
out Syria. Partly because of Turkish complaints, and partly because of their
own desire to limit any Kurdish activism that might provoke Turkish interven-
tion (or otherwise threaten French authority), the French closely monitored
Kurdish activists in Syria. They kept particularly detailed notes on members
of the Khoybun and their activities, at one point collecting information sheets
(fiches de renseignements) on thirty-eight of them from intelligence officers

The Border and the Kurds

[ii5

throughout the mandate territories - an example of how securing the border
required effective state authority across the territory. 64 But Turkish complaints
prompting a French response also touched on what Ankara viewed as Kurdish
propaganda activities (such as those of one Hilmi Yildirim, in Beirut 65 ), or
cultural activities. In 1936, the High Commissioner banned the entry, sale, cir-
culation, usage or publication in Syria ‘of the Kurdish phonographic disks no.
507/11 and 508/11 put on sale by the “Societe Orientale Sodwa” of Aleppo
and sung in Kurdish by Said Agha Jisraoui’ at the request of the Turkish
Consul General. 66

Ironically, such measures may have encouraged the integration of border-
crossing Kurdish insurgents and the longer established Syrian Kurdish popu-
lation. Earlier, I discussed the French policy of distancing certain groups and
individuals from the Syrian-Turkish frontier. In some cases, Kurdish activists
were moved not only outside the ‘exclusion zone’, but to Damascus or Beirut.
At one time or another, most of the prominent leaders of the Kurdish move-
ment in the Jazira - the Badr Khan brothers, Hajo Agha and so on - were in
residence obligatoire in one of the major cities. Among them was ‘Uthman
Sabri, who founded a Kurdish-language school in the (heavily Arabised)
Kurdish quarter of Damascus and actively promoted ‘Kurdist’ 67 politics there:
not, one imagines, the neutralisation that Turkey hoped for when it pushed for
activists to be removed from the frontier zone. 68 Others settled in Syrian cities
voluntarily. Once there, men like Sabri certainly did not refrain from politics,
as we will see shortly; but as the example of his school shows, they were also
active in the field of cultural production. Jaladat Bey Badr Khan developed the
Latin script for writing Kurdish and published a review in the Kirmanji dialect
of the language while resident in Damascus. 69 His brother Kamran ‘Ali Badr
Khan also published a review, and in the 1940s would broadcast in Kurdish on
Radio Levant and successfully lobby the High Commission for funding to send
Kurdish students to study in France. 70 Earlier, in 1924, a Kurdish writer from
Iraq resident in Aleppo had requested a French subsidy towards publishing a
history of the Kurds, written in Kurdish (in Arabic script). 71 These activities
targeted the Kurdish population not (or not only) of the border zone, but of the
cities - just as the Turkish pressure that had put these men in the cities applied
to all of Syria’s Kurds.

It seems reasonable to suggest that cultural activities of this kind contributed
to the development of a greater sense of Kurdish identity among Damascene
Kurds. Such a sense of identity should not be taken for granted as politically
salient: the inhabitants of the Kurdish quarter of Damascus - Hayy al-Akmd,
literally ‘quarter of the Kurds’ - were largely Arabised and well integrated into
the social structure of the city. 72 The leading notable families of the quarter,
the al-Yusufs and the Shamdins, were among the most prominent in the city:
they owned land in the countryside around Damascus, had served the local
Ottoman administration at high levels, and in the nineteenth century had like

ii 6 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

other families of their class left their quarter of origin for more comfortable
accommodation in Suq Saruja. 73 (Very comfortable: the Yusuf house covered
some 2,070 m 2 . 74 ) Like other such families, however, they also retained their
patronage networks in their quarter of origin. In these circumstances, it may
seem odd that in the 1930s we find ‘Umar Agha Shamdin supporting Kurdist
claims to autonomy in the far northeast of Syria 75 : the mere fact that activists
from that region (or Turkey) were in obligatory residence in Damascus only
goes part way to explaining it.

A further explanation lies in the local micropolitics of Damascus under
French rule. The High Commission was ever keen to divide Syrians up into
ethnically or religiously distinct groups, and promote chosen interlocutors as
‘leaders’ of those groups at the expense of actors with broader Syrian loyal-
ties. For Syria’s Christian communities, clergymen often claimed that role.
Similarly, presenting himself as representative of Syria’s Kurds (rather than
‘just’ a Damascene notable) could give a figure like ‘Umar Agha privileged
access to the resources of the mandatory state. This could be a distinct advan-
tage in the inter-family notable politics of Damascus - especially after 1936,
when many of the city’s notables were committed to the National Bloc govern-
ment, and the French were seeking ways to undermine it. (It is not surprising
that the French paid particular attention to Kurdist mobilisations in Hayy
al-Akrad, and the participation in them of notables like ‘Umar Agha, during
the Bloc’s rule.)

At the same time, promoting a Kurdist variety of politics among the inhab-
itants of ‘their’ quarter would give such notables a means of renewing their tra-
ditional patronage networks under a new form, in the face of the threat from
new social forces and the transformation of politics they heralded in the 1930s
- a threat that the notables of the Bloc also faced, and (for the time being) suc-
cessfully. We see this dynamic at work in the tension between communists in
the quarter, including the leader of Syria’s Communist Party, Khalid Bakdash,
on the one hand, and, on the other, the quarter’s notables and Kurdist activ-
ists from the northeast in forced residence in the city. Communists in Hayy
al-Akrad were hostile to French imperialism and to those who treated with it;
they tended to perceive Kurdist activities as serving French ends. Hence, when
a club in the quarter produced propaganda in favour of Kurdish autonomy
in the northeast, the French intelligence services reported that ‘communist
members inhabiting this quarter . . . are leading active measures to check the
development of this idea, saying that the movement’s promoters are in the
pay of the French’. 76 But this antagonism worked both ways: when Bakdash
attempted to set up a ‘so-called Boxing Club [Club sportif de Boxe ]’ he ran
into bitter opposition from ‘Uthman Sabri, who, ‘in agreement with certain
notables of this quarter’, sought to persuade the French authorities to prevent
the Interior Ministry from authorising Bakdash’s request. Sabri and Bakdash
were already in conflict: Sabri’s anti-communist propaganda among young

The Border and the Kurds

[ 117

Kurds had led many to abandon the Communist Party. ‘He is thus very vio-
lently attacked by Bakdash and his friends who openly accuse him of being a
spy in the pay of the “French”.’ 77

All this is to say that there was nothing self-evident about the choice of
some residents of Hayy al-Akrad to adopt a politics based on Kurdish identity.
Nonetheless, the logic of the nation-state form tended to create links between
Kurds across the territory of the new state; or rather, to create the potential
for shared political action on ‘ethnic’ grounds. As soon as the new border
was drawn, it placed Damascus and other Syrian cities within a single field of
political action with the northeast, while cutting that region off from centres
that were closer - certainly geographically, perhaps culturally, and in the past
politically - such as Mosul or Diyarbakir (not to mention the old imperial
centre of Istanbul). Hence two leaders of the first great Kurdish revolt against
the Turkish Republic, in exile in the Jazira in the 1920s, receiving permission
to visit Damascus ‘to collect the subsidies of the local Kurdish community
there’. 78 Hence, too, Jaladat Bey Badr Khan travelling to Damascus in late
1931, where the intelligence services reported that he was ‘canvassing [tra-
vaille, literally ‘working’] Kurdish circles, in favour of cooperation with the
fatherland’. 79

Even activists from the Jazira whose aspirations lay in that region or over
the border in Turkey were drawn to Damascus by the structures of the Syrian
state. When Kurds who had left Turkey sought to be integrated in the Syrian
security forces in the early 1930s, they requested the help of a Kurdish deputy
to the Syrian parliament, Mustafa Shahin Bey. 80 For all Shahin Bey’s own
Kurdish nationalism, they thus became implicated (like him) in Syrian political
structures centred on Damascus. The same dynamic, in which the Jazira had
become a peripheral zone of a Syrian nation-state centred on Damascus, is
visible in the case of one Yunis Agha, ‘Kurdish notable of the Haute-Djezireh’.
He hoped to improve his chances of becoming that province’s governor by
coming to the capital in September 1937 ‘to make contact with the notables of
the Kurdish quarter’ and seek their support. 81 Kurdish identity provided him
with a means of bolstering his political ambitions on the periphery by creating
a potential link between him and figures at the centre who had some leverage
there, as influential actors in the city or (particularly) as favoured interlocu-
tors of the French. But it was the new state form of Syria that brought him to
Damascus in the first place.

Conclusion

In the summer of 1930, a group of Kurdish notables sent a petition to the High
Commission requesting that the Syrian state bureaucracy in the Jazira employ
more Kurds. The French, though they viewed it as a manoeuvre of the Badr
Khans intended to strengthen Kurdish communal feeling, were sympathetic to

n8 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

this desire insofar as it permitted them to treat the Kurds as a distinct popu-
lation. But their response shows how Syrian state structures determined the
options open to Kurds and French alike.

The Jazira was still part of the Sanjak of Dayr al-Zur at that point, and the
French Assistant Delegate there noted that seven of the nineteen signatories
to the petition were refugees who had ‘not yet lost Turkish nationality’: to
be considered for employment in the Syrian administration Kurds had to be
Syrian nationals. But he did agree with the way of accommodating the peti-
tion’s wishes that his superior had suggested: in the absence of candidates
who were both sufficiently educated and Syrian nationals in the region itself,
a Damascene Kurd should be appointed to head the still rudimentary local
bureaucracy. ‘And when the administration is definitively established, we
might investigate if among the Kurdish population of Syrian nationality in
the Flaute-Djezireh there are a few individuals apt to be admitted to subaltern
positions.’ 82

The example shows how the unpredictable dynamics of state construction had
brought all Kurds within Syria’s borders together, in a not entirely voluntary
way. In the context of the new state, a shared identity could be a useful vehicle
for individual actors’ political ambitions, allowing them to forge links with
new allies across the territory. Such an identity-based form of politics gained
a boost from the presence of the French, with their preference for structur-
ing divisions into Syrian society - which in some cases forced a politicised
‘identity’ onto ordinary Syrians from above. But it was made possible by the
development of the modern state apparatus.

The border, as we saw, was both an outcome of that development and a
spur to it. It played a crucial role in the politics of community in the new state,
by working to delimit - literally - the field of political action that was open
to individuals within it, even when their aspirations lay across the new border
in southern Anatolia. As a cross-border group, the Kurds were particularly
affected by the border, but they were not alone: Turks in northern Syria or
Arabs in southern Turkey also found themselves transformed into minorities
by the region’s new borders, and dozens of groups in Europe were in a similar
situation in this period. The existence of such cross-border groups could, and
in some cases did, cause the embryonic borders of the inter -war world’s new
nation-states to be redrawn; but it also stimulated the development of those
borders, as nervous states perceived such groups as a threat, and sought to
manage them. It was not the only factor in the firming-up of frontiers, but it
was important, and as the borders hardened they in turn acted to constitute
such populations as minorities within each state. Those minorities did not exist
as such before the borders were drawn: the border defined them as a numeri-
cal minority within the state, and the modern state’s developing institutions
and policies influenced their political and cultural existence as a coherent

The Border and the Kurds

[ 119

community: 83 for example, by bringing a Kurdish nationalist activist from the
Jazira to open a Kurdish-language school and make political connections with
notables among the Arabised inhabitants of Hayy al-Akrad.

What holds for the communities brought together as minorities within
Syria, though, also holds for the community brought together as a majority.
The notion of a shared Arab identity allowed urban nationalists in Damascus
to counter Kurdist demands for autonomy in the northeast:

we want them to build their independence in their homeland [diyarihim] ‘Kurdistan’,
not in the Arab Jazira, the birthplace [mawtin] of Shammar, ‘Anaza, Tayy, al-Jabbur,
and other great Arab tribes. The Jazira was the cradle of Arabness [mahd al- c uruba]
before the Islamic conquest . . .

That a people should work to amputate an essentially Arab part [ juz ’ ‘ arabi
samim] from their fatherland for the sake of a hundred Kurdish villages in the north
of the Jazira that were and remain grazing lands for the flocks and horses of the
Arabs - this is a grave matter, that all the Arab lands will shake over [bcidbci amr jalcil
tahtazz labu al-aqtdr al- c arabiyya jam c a’a ]. S4

Here, it is a nationalist who is using cultural identity to build a political alli-
ance with actors at the periphery, and claim the territory of the Jazira for an
Arab Syria.

This also shows the danger of identity-based politics in the modern nation-
state. When the state is conceived of as the expression of the will of one nation,
there is a risk that mobilisations on the basis of a different cultural identity
will be seen by the state and ‘its’ nationalists as inherently threatening to the
integrity of the state. It does not follow, though, that states are condemned to
a zero-sum struggle between majority and minorities. The nationalisms that
link states to their populations do not have to be closed and exclusive. In the
context of anti-colonial struggle it is not hard to see why Syrian Arab nation-
alism was suspicious of other mobilisations on ethnic grounds, but hostility
was not foreordained: we also saw examples of Syrian Kurds who were not
attracted to Kurdist mobilisations. Khalid Bakdash is the most obvious of
these: as a communist, Bakdash believed that Syrian Arab nationalism was a
historical necessity, and accompanied the National Bloc delegation to Paris in
1936 as an adviser. The documents that relate his clash with TJthman Sabri
make clear that he was not the only communist in the Kurdish quarter, and
Sabri’s Kurdist group competed for support among the quarter’s politically
active youth not only with the communists, but with the League of National
Action, an Arab nationalist formation that was younger and more radical than
the Bloc. 85

That young Kurds were involved in these political movements shows that
their political identity was not defined by being Kurdish; it also shows that
these nationalist groups were not closed to ‘Kurds’ by definition. When we see

i2o ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

actors using cultural identity as the basis for their political claims, it may be
more useful to ask how the game of political competition - played out on the
terrain of the modern nation-state - encouraged them to make cultural identity
the vehicle of their ambitions, rather than assuming that cultural identity auto-
matically inspired and defined those ambitions . 86 After all, in this same period,
Kurdish leaders in the highlands of the Kurd Dagh near the western end of
the Syrian-Turkish frontier were claiming a Turkish identity, and requesting
their region’s incorporation into Turkey . 87 The development of the modern
nation-state made majority and minority into meaningful categories in Syria,
as elsewhere, but it did not determine how those categories would be defined.

Notes

1. Many of the places referred to in this chapter are marked on Map 2. 1 would like to
acknowledge at the outset my debt to Seda Altug for several long discussions that
directly influenced (and benefited) my thinking in this chapter.

2. All details on this incident are from MWT wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 2; wizdrat
al-khdrijiyya. 23 - particularly the interior minister’s letter to the foreign minister
(27/2/1939) and the handwritten letter from qa’immaqam of Qamishli to minister
of interior (21/2/1939) that informs it.

3. Also unclear is whether the flags were defaced on Syrian or Turkish territory: it
happened in front of a cafe near the municipal building, but the documents do not
say which town.

4. To refer only to standard works, see Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle
East, pp. 163-73; J. L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East. A History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 11 (p. 183 for ‘Winston’s hiccup’); Yapp, The
Making of the Modern Near East, ch. 6, and The Near East since the First World
War. A History to 1995 (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 35-46; David Fromkin, A
Peace to End all Peace. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the
Modern Middle East, paperback edn (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 513-14
and ch. 61; Avi Shlaim, War and Peace in the Middle East. A Concise History, rev.
and updated paperback edn (London: Penguin, 1995), ch. 1.

5. There are exceptions, such as Inga Brandell (ed.), State Frontiers: Borders and
Boundaries in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). Like much of the best
work on borders, however, this is anthropological rather than historical.

6. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 104, 122, 135, 185. This was also
evident to commentators at the time: see references to AlifBa’ (1 September 1932)
in Chapter 3.

7. Jean Perez, ‘Les compagnies meharistes au Levant (1921-1941)’, Revue historique
des armees. No. 233, pp. 79-96.

8. Eliezer Tauber, ‘The struggle for Dayr al-Zur: the determination of borders
between Syria and Iraq’, International Journal of Middle East Studies (1991),
23(3): 361-85.

The Border and the Kurds

[ IZI

9. See Chapter 3 for a discussion of the ddr al-hukuma and other sites of state
authority.

10. The information on the Syrian-Turkish border comes from Seda Altug; the infor-
mation on the Syrian-Iraqi border is familiar to anyone who has followed the news
since the invasion.

11. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate , pp. 99-110.

12. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate , p. 102; Mizrahi, Gen'ese de I’Etat manda-
taire, p. 172.

13. SHAT 4 H Box 168, dossier 1: Operations des troupes du territoire de I’Eupbrate
dans la Haute-Djezireh (occupation du Bee de Canard) 1927-1930, subdossier
Organisation des Postes du Bee de Canard et occupation de [ces postes], Note sur
Paction politique menee dans la Region Nord de Djezireh . . . (1/12/1926).

14. SHAT 4 H Box 168, dossier 1, Operations des troupes du territoire de I’Eupbrate
dans la Flaute-Djezireh (occupation du Bee de Canard) 1927-1930. Printed map,
Abornement de la frontiere Turco-Syrienne entre Nissibin et le Tigre d’apres
le protocole d’ Angora du 22 juin 1929. This infringement could still provoke
the indignation of a certain kind of French military historian in the twenty-first
century: see Perez, ‘Les compagnies meharistes’.

15. Quoted Pierre Fournie and Jean-Louis Riccioli, La France et le Proche-Orient
1916-1946. Une chronique photographique de la presence franqaise en Syrie et au
Liban, en Palestine, au Hedjaz et en Cilicie (Tournai: Casterman, 1996), p. 153.

16. Details, including Hajo Agha’s subsequent interrogation in Damascus, are in
AD-SL Box 572, dossier Passage de Hadjo Agha et des fils de Djemil Pacha en
Turquie 1930. NB: for this and other Kurdish names I have used a rough but con-
sistent transliteration rather than adopt any one of the multiple variants in French
sources.

17. All details and quotes from MWT wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 2; wizarat al-ddkbiliyya
- al-amn al-cdm - taqdrTr. 1: report from KhayrT Rida, qa’immaqam of Kurd Dagh,
to wali of Aleppo (25/4/1934).

18. MWT ivatbaiq al-dawla, sijill 2; wizarat al-khdrijiyya. 21: documents dated
27/12/1938-15/1/1939. By this time, incidentally, the name of the caza had been
Arabised from the Turkish Kurd Ddgh to the Arabic jabal al-Akrdd.

19. A brief and relevant overview of Turkish history in this period can be found in Erik
J. Ziircher, Turkey: A Modern History, 3rd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), chs
10 - 11 .

20. Seda Altug and Benjamin Thomas White, ‘Frontieres et pouvoir d’Etat. La frontiere
turco-syrienne dans les annees 1920 et 1930’, Vingtieme siecle. Revue d’histoire
(2009), No. 103, pp. 91-104, expands on the following, with more detail on the
Turkish side.

21. Tachjian, La France en Cilicie, chs 5-8, examines this question from the
vantage point of the communities regarded as inassimilable by the republican
government.

22. A more detailed account of Turkish policy towards the Kurds in this period can

111 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

be found in McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, ch. 9. Henri J. Barkey
and Graham E. Fuller, Turkey’s Kurdish Question (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1998), ch. 1, surveys this period as background to the contemporary
relationship between the Turkish Republic and its Kurds. An overview of Kurdish
relations to the modern state more broadly is Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Kurdish
society and the modern state: ethnic nationalism versus nation-building’, in his
Kurdish Ethno-nationalism versus Nation-building States. Collected Articles
(Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000), pp. 43-65.

23. Robert W. Olson and William F. Tucker, ‘The Sheikh Sait rebellion in Turkey
(1925)’, Die Welt des Islams (1978), new series 18(3/4): 195-211; Kemal Kiri§gi,
‘Migration and Turkey: the dynamics of state, society and politics’, in Re§at
Kasaba (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4: Turkey in the Modern
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 7, p. 180.

24. For a recent discussion of Turkish policy towards the Kurdish regions in this
period, see Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern
Turkey. Who is a Turk? (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 6.

25. An account of this revolt, in historical perspective, is given in Robert W. Olson,
‘The Kurdish rebellions of Sheikh Said (1925), Mt. Ararat (1930), and Dersim
(1937-8): their impact on the development of the Turkish air force and on Kurdish
and Turkish nationalism’, Die Welt des Islams (2000), new series, 40(1): 67-94.

26. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1925, subdossier Transports des troupes pour
la revolte Kurde 1925. Note pour Monsieur I’Officier de Liaison Britannique
(3/3/1925).

27. AD-SL Box 1054, same dossier and subdossier, Message telephone, Delegue
Adjoint (Aleppo) to HC, 19/3/1925 gives figures for mid-March - well over 1,000
troops, plus supplies, carried by several trains on 17th, for example. Such heavy
use of the line actually strained the economy of the whole Aleppo region: same
location, telegram from SR to Mougin, French ambassador to Turkey (27/3/1925).
Some figures for June are in AD-SL Box 1054, same dossier, subdossier Passage des
Troupes a Muslimie.

28. Cagaptay, Islam, Secidarism, and Nationalism, p. 106, lists numerous minor and
major insurgencies in different parts of Turkish Kurdistan in these years.

29. See, e.g., AD-SL Box 1054, dossiers Kurdes 1925, Kurdes 1926 and Kurdes 1927,
though more material (up to the early 1930s) is scattered throughout boxes 1054
and 1055. The Service des Renseignements reported in February 1928 on Turkish
military preparations intended to pre-empt a spring recurrence of the Kurdish
insurgency: AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Question Kurde - Mouvement Kurde en
Syrie - Annee 1928. Bulletin de renseignements N° 10 (4/2/1928).

30. Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism, p. 111.

31. Some doubt that an actual rebellion had even occurred prior, rather than subse-
quent, to Turkish repression: Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Genocide in Kurdistan? The
suppression of the Dersim rebellion in Turkey (1937-38) and the chemical war
against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)’, in George J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Conceptual and

The Border and the Kurds

[ 123

Historical Dimensions of Genocide (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1994), pp. 141-70, and especially Nicole Watts, ‘Relocating Dersim:
Turkish state-building and Kurdish resistance, 1931-1938’, Neiv Perspectives on
Turkey (2000), 23: 5-30.

32. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1925, subdossier Pieces au sujet du passage
en Syrie de populations Kurdes ou chretiennes ou de deserteurs Hires. Delegue
Adjoint, Aleppo, to HC (1/3/1925).

33. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Question Kurde - Mouvement Kurde en Syrie. Annees
1926 et 1927. Ponsot to MAE (this copy intended for French ambassador to
Turkey; 29/9/1927).

34. Information in this paragraph from AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1925,
subdossier Installation provisoire d’un Officier du S.R. a Arab Pounar. Note de
Service (22/3/1925).

35. Before assuming that this material weakness of the state was restricted to colo-
nial backwaters like Jarablus, consider Eugen Weber’s comment on metropolitan
France in the 1930s: ‘Machines in general were not much in demand. Inspecteurs
des finances on tour through the provinces remember few or none in banks, post
offices, tax bureaus; no typewriters, and no typewritten reports, no calculators’:
The Hollow Years, p. 63.

36. It was the source for several Informations produced by the Direction de la Surete
generale - successor to the SR - included in Box 572, untitled dossier (material
released under sixty-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie - Informations.

37. On the first two items in this list, see AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde
(1928), subdossier Question Kurde - Immigrants - Refugies Kurdes. Principal
inspector of customs. Syria and Alaouites, to Ripert, assistant delegate for Sanjak
of Dayr al-Zur (dated ‘24 X bre 1927’ but referred to in other correspondence as
dated 24/12/1927).

38. This and following quotes from AD-SL Box 572, dossier Passage en Syrie de
populations Kurdes ou chretiennes ou de deserteurs Turcs. Note N° 868/K.3,
signed Sarrail (5/3/1925). This document also gives instructions regarding poten-
tial Assyro-Chaldean immigrants from Iraq, and deserters from the Turkish army.
The arrival of the former was considered imminent (a harbinger of events in the
1930s); they too were to be kept away from the Turkish border. The latter remind
us that the imposition of Turkish state authority on the Kurds also involved assert-
ing it, through conscription, over other citizens - some of whom were evidently
unenthusiastic.

39. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of such documents in the French records
on the Kurds for these years. One, sent by the assistant delegate for the Sanjak of
Dayr al-Zur to refute Turkish claims about the activities of Kurds who had settled
there, refers to the 1925 note as ‘still in force’ in 1927. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier
Question Kurde - Mouvement Kurde en Syrie. Annees 1926 et 1927. Ripert to
HC, 9/12/1927.

40. Mizrahi, Genese de I’Etat mandataire, p. 178. Mizrahi discusses these agreements

124 J 77 ; e Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

in some detail (pp. 172-8), and describes (p. 178) the ‘difficult extension towards
the east of the logics of state’.

41. He spent a year or so in forced residence in Damascus before being permitted to
settle in Hasaka in June 1931. Details are in AD-SL Box 572, dossier Passage de
Had jo Agba et des fils Djemil Pacha en Turquie 1930.

42. AD-SL Box 620, dossier Mouvement minoritaire Chretien , subdossier La ques-
tion des minorites en Syrie et en Irak (Generalites - correspondances, informa-
tions). Minutes of League Council meeting (entitled Protection des minorites.
Etablissement des Assyriens de I’lrak), n.d. but internal evidence makes clear the
meeting took place on 17/4/1935.

43. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1925, subdossier III l 01. Sarraut to MAE
(3/6/1925). The ambassador in question, Albert Sarraut, played an important role
in French colonial history: see Martin C. Thomas, ‘Albert Sarraut, French colonial
development, and the communist threat, 1919-1930’, The Journal of Modern
History (2005), 77(4): 917-55.

44. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde (1928), subdossier Reclamations
turques a/s des chefs Kurdes de Hte Djezireh - Hadjo, Emin Agha, Edem
Tcherkesse, Mudir d’Amouda, Fils d’lbrahim Pacha. Extracts from Essiasa (that
is, al-Siydsa), forwarded to Beirut by French Consul in Mesopotamia in letter
(27/6/1925).

45. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Question Kurde - Mouvement Kurde en Syrie. Annees
1926 et 1927. HC (though signed Maugras) to HC’s acting delegate in Damascus
(13/12/1927). Other documents refer to ‘Abd al-Rahim as Sa'id’s son.

46. AD-SL Box 1055, same dossier. HC to MAE (14/12/1927).

47. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Question Kurde - Mouvement Kurde en Syrie. Annees
1926 et 1927. Ripert to HC (9/12/1927).

48. This and following quotes from AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde
(1928), subdossier Mouvement kurde. Report: Situation des refugies en Haute-
Djezireh. Octobre 1927 (actually dated 6/1/1928). Poidebard’s name is misspelled
‘Poidebar’ on the front page. More information from this very well-informed
source can be found in SHAT Box 4 H 168, unenclosed subdossier Notes sur la
Haute Djezireh par le P[ere] Poidebar d 1924-1930 - Haute Djezireh, note du SR
1924.

49. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under sixty-year rule), subdos-
sier Les Kurdes en Syrie - Informations. Information N° 4196 (14/9/1932). NB:
the ‘would be’ translates an untranslatable French use of the conditional to report
alleged or unconfirmed facts.

50. AD-SL Box 572, dossier Immigration eventuelle de Kurdes en Syrie - exonerationfs]
taxe douaniere pour les [troupeaux] . HC’s delegate to Syria to delegate-general
(relations exterieures) (25/8/1932).

51. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1925, subdossier III l 01. Billotte to acting HC
(26/5/1924).

52. One such was Jalal Qadri [Celal Kadri], who usually figures in French sources

The Border and the Kurds

[ 125

as Djelal Kadri. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde (1928), subdos-
sier Reclamations turques a/s des chefs Kurdes de Hte Djezireh - Hadjo, Emin
Agba, Edem Tcherkesse, Mudir d’Amouda, Fils d’lbrahim Pacha. Telegram, HC
to ‘Ambafrance Constantinople’ (13/8/1925), and Message Telephone, Delegue
Adjoint for Vilayet of Aleppo to HC (11/8/1925). Later, as alleged Turkish
agent: AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Question Kurde - Mouvement Kurde en Syrie.
Annees 1926 et 1927. Extract from Bulletin de renseignements d’Alep N° 274
(27/12/1927).

53. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1919-1922 - 1923, untitled subdossier. NOTE
au sujet des propositions de R. Bey concernant le Kurdistan (3/1/1923).

54. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde (1928), subdossier Incidents de
Derbissie - mai 26. Compte-rendu sommaire de Ventrevue franco-turque, du 7
Mai 1926 a Derbessie. (Different spellings of the same place name are entirely
normal.) This document also outlines the conflicting accounts of what had actually
happened. The Turks claimed it began when rebel Kurds had crossed the border to
attack Turkish soldiers guarding a train; French enquiries suggested that the attack
was provoked by Turkish soldiers trying to steal sheep from Kurds south of the
border.

55. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1925, subdossier Pieces au sujet du passage
en Syrie de populations Kurdes ou chretiennes ou de deserteurs turcs. Letter
to Commander-in-Chief of Armee du Levant [that is, HC], 18/3/1925. For a
later expression of Turkish worry on this subject, see AD-SL Box 1055, dossier
Mouvement Kurde (1928), subdossier Question Kurde - Immigrants - Refugies
Kurdes. Note, MAE to Turkish Embassy (13/4/1927).

56. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde (1928), subdossier Incidents de
Derbissie - mai 26. Letter from MAE, unaddressed but presumably to HC,
regarding Note de I’Ambassade de Turquie (12/5/192 6).

57. Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism, p. 112.

58. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, p. 203. A French Silrete generate
document outlining the origins of the Khoybun and its relations with the Dashnak
is in AD-SL Box 572, dossier Demande d’installation de chefs Kurdes en Syrie,
subdossier Installation de Tribus Kurdes en Hte. Djezireh. Note sur le mouvement
Kurde (4/1/1931).

59. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1927, subdossier III l 01. Note pour le
Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud (19/11/1927).

60. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, pp. 202-7; Michael M. Gunter,
Historical Dictionary of the Kurds (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2004), ‘Khoybun’.

61. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, p. 203.

62. AD-SL Box 572, dossier Demande d’installation de chefs Kurdes en Syrie, subdos-
sier Installation de Tribus Kurdes en Hte. Djezireh. Note sur le mouvement Kurde
(4/1/1931).

63. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Kurdes - 1932, subdossier Entrevue du chef kurde
Kameran Beder Khan avec le Consul de Turquie a Beyrouth. Information N°

126

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

77 (8/12/1932) - the long account here is evidently based on Badr Khan’s own
description of the meeting.

64. AD-SL Box 571, dossier [Relations exterieures ] en Syrie, subdossier Ficbes sur les
membres du Comite Kurde - [+ illegible].

65. AD-SL Box 572, dossier Requete du Consul general de Turquie a/s des brochures
de propagande prokurde publiees par le nomme Hilmi Yildirim. Turkish Consul
General in Beirut to Meyrier (Delegue General), 24/9/1936. An unattributed
French intelligence document headed Hilmi Yeldurum (27/10/193 6) suggested that
he was, rather, a Turkish agent.

66. AD-SL Box 571, dossier Requete du Consul General de Turquie a/s disques de
propagande prokurde mis en circulation a Alep. Decision du Haut-Commissaire
N° 343. The Consul-General’s request is also included in this dossier (in fact, just
a slender paper folder).

67. I am using this term to denote political mobilisations around the sense of Kurdish
cultural identity, without accepting the nationalist claim that all such mobilisations
are Kurdish nationalist. Future instances will be without inverted commas.

68. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under sixty-year rule), subdos-
sier Les Kurdes en Syrie - Informations. Information N° 404/S (23/6/1939).

69. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, p. 468.

70. AD-SL (Series B) Box 33, dossier 1053: Docteur Kameran Bey BEDER KHAN.
Note: Docteur Kamouran Beder KHAN (27/4/1944). It seems likely that the
review in question was the same as that published by Jaladat Bey. However, this
source gives its place of publication as Beirut, while McDowall gives Damascus for
Jaladat Bey’s.

71. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1924. Compte-Rendu, Aleppo SR (24/9/1924).

72. McDowall estimates that some 40 per cent of its inhabitants were ‘entirely
Arabicized’ by 1920: A Modern History of the Kurds, p. 467. Tejel Gorgas (‘Le
mouvement kurde’, p. 112), citing but not referencing a British diplomatic source,
states that the quarter was divided into three sections, one largely kurdophone,
one largely arabophone and one where neither language predominated. See also
Benjamin Thomas White, ‘The Kurds of Damascus in the 1930s: development of a
politics of ethnicity’, Middle Eastern Studies (2010), 46(6): 901-17.

73. Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus
1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), gives details of the
rise to prominence of these two families through Ottoman political structures and
local landowning in the nineteenth century, and of relations between them. They
dominated the prestigious office of commander of the pilgrimage to Mecca in
late Ottoman times: Nelida Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the city: the Kurdish quarter
of Damascus between Ottoman and French rule, c. 1724-1946’, Urban History
(2003), 30(2): 206-24.

74. c Abd al-Razzaq Moaz, ‘The urban fabric of an extramural quarter in 19th-century
Damascus’, in Philipp and Schaebler (eds), The Syrian Land, pp. 165-83, reference
at 169.

The Border and the Kurds

[ 127

75. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under sixty-year rule), subdos-
sier Les Kurdes en Syrie - Informations. Information N° 541 1 (3/7/1939).

76. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Informations N° 110/S (6/3/1939),
5185 (21/6/1939), 6062 (5/8/1939).

77. This and preceding quotations from AD-SL Box 572, same folder and subdossier,
Damascus Surete Information N° 404/S (23/6/1939). NB: the quotation marks
around the word «French» are pencilled-in on this document.

78. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde (1928), subdossier Question Kurde
- Immigrants - Refugies Kurdes. High Commissioner’s delegate to State of Syria
to HC (27/3/1928). The subsidies were to support destitute refugees (though the
Turks suspected, probably not without reason, that they were used to fund military
activities too).

79. AD-SL Box 572, dossier Menees Armeno-Kurdes. Information N° 4401
(24/11/1931). The phrase in French is actually ‘la mere patrie ’, the ‘mother
fatherland’ (patrie being feminine). That Kurdistan was the ‘fatherland’ of the
residents of Hayy al-Akrad in this romantic nationalist sense is itself a nationalist
assumption.

80. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Information N° 2273 (11/5/1932).

81. This and preceding quotes from AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released
under sixty-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie - Informations. Information
N° 4532 (2/9/1937). In this document his name appears as Younes.

82. This and preceding quote from AD-SL Box 572, dossier Passage en Syrie de popu-
lations Kurdes ou chretiennes ou de deserteurs Turcs. Assistant Delegate (delegue
adjoint) for Sanjak of Dayr al-Zur to Delegate for State of Syria (5/8/1930).

83. This also explains why the border worked to constitute as minorities populations
which, unlike the Kurds, did not spread across more than one state.

84. In Arabic, ‘al-baraka al-kurdiyya fi Suriyya. Idji’u al-kurd yasTm li-ta’sis watan
kurdf. Al-Ayydm, 11/7/1932. This article does not refer to Damascene Kurds,
however, and nor do others I found regarding the ‘Kurdish question’.

85. On the League see Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, especially pp. 400-34
for its origins and composition.

86. We should also remember that the archives we study were not constructed by
neutral observers: French imperial policy in Syria is reflected in the construction of
the archive itself, which in its very classifications emphasises the political salience
of ‘Kurdishness’ in Syria. See White, ‘The Kurds of Damascus’.

87. E.g., during the Alexandretta crisis (see documents in AD-SL Box 571, dossier La
question des Kurdes en Syrie. Correspondance. Les Comites Kurds).

PART III

CHAPTER

5

THE FRAN CO' SYRIAN TREATY AND THE
DEFINITION OF 'MINORITIES'

Introduction

Ignace Nouri thought that the meaning of ‘minority’ was self-evident when
he wrote to the High Commissioner in 1936 about treaty guarantees for ‘the
minorities, that is to say the Christians and Jews’. 1 A few years earlier, the
Aleppo deputy Latif Ghanime - like Nouri, a Syrian-Catholic - took a different
view. He told the French intelligence services that the Syrian parliament would
be more likely to ratify a treaty containing minority guarantees if they applied
to ethnic minorities as well as religious ones: this would make it possible to
‘range among the minoritarians the Kurdish deputies of the North and the
Djezireh, the Tcherkess deputy of Kuneitra, even Soubhi Bey Barakat and the
deputies of the Sanjak of Alexandretta as representatives of the “Turks’”. 2 His
own patriarchate apparently disagreed. Ethnolinguistic minorities, meanwhile,
were not only defined from the outside: ‘the Tcherkess of Syria’, said a petition
signed by Circassians from several parts of the country, ‘have always claimed
their national minority rights as a community having its own race, language
and traditions different from those of the Syrian majority’. 3

So who was a minority? The answer was evidently open to dispute. But
there is another question, just as important but perhaps less obvious: why,
around 1930, did all of these people start calling themselves - or others -
‘minorities’? At the outset of the mandate, few people thought that Syria
had ‘minorities’; by the 1930s, as French observers seriously entertained the
possibility of Syrian independence (of a sort), they were commonly using the
term - and Syrians were too. This chapter explores the reasons why the term
came into use in Syria when it did, and what different actors sought to gain by
using it. The question of minorities was part of a wider contest over the insti-
tutional relationship between the population and the state, which was being

132 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

redefined by Syria’s transformation from province of a non-national empire to
nation-state.

The Legal Status of Minorities as a Measure of States’ Independence in the
post-First World War World

After the establishment of the League of Nations, the nation-state became the
only internationally legitimate form for independent states. The League itself
was the guarantor of this legitimacy: at international level, only the League

- as the representative of the international community - could recognise a
state as independent. But this recognition was granted in different degrees: the
independence of states was measured by their relationship to the League. If
this was the gauge of a state’s independence, the legal protection accorded to
‘minorities’ might be seen as the needle.

During the inter -war period different states accorded different measures
of legal protection to defined minorities, in a system regulated by the newly
established League of Nations. The most independent and least independent
states, imperial powers and their colonies, had no minorities as such: that is,
no legally-recognised minority communities whose rights they were obliged
to protect or on whose behalf the League was competent to intervene. The
‘old’ nation-states without imperial possessions also had no minorities in
this sense. The independence of countries such as Sweden or Argentina was
not dependent on the League for its recognition, and their membership of
the League was not dependent on their offering guaranteed protection to
minorities.

This was not the case for the wholly new nation-states of post-First World
War Europe, or the nation-states (such as the Balkan states) which had been
established before the war but, during it, had expanded their boundaries
and acquired substantial ‘non-national’ populations. Without using the term
‘minority’, since the nineteenth century, and especially since the Congress of
Berlin in 1878, the international treaties by which the Great Powers recog-
nised new states - notably the Balkan states that seceded from the Ottoman
Empire - had included guarantees of the rights of subordinate religious
groups. The Supreme Allied Council meeting in Paris in 1919 did adopt the
term, sought to include in that category not just religious but also ‘racial’ and
linguistic groups, and attempted to regularise the protection of minorities in
such states. A Minority Committee set up this wider definition of the term and
a system of supervision, based on minorities treaties with standard articles, to
be overseen by the League of Nations and the International Court of Justice

- with a policing role for the victorious Allied powers. The new and newly-
expanded nation-states were obliged to sign up to these treaties to obtain
the recognition of the League, and therefore of the international community.
Since these obligations limited the authority and formal independence of the

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [133

state, the new states (and their new majorities) accepted them grudgingly.
They also saw the treaties as an encouragement to separatist or irredentist
groups, and as an invitation to other states - either the imperial powers, or
neighbouring states with links to one of the minorities so defined - to interfere
in their internal affairs. 4

Next came the states under mandate, like Syria, whose independence
the League had provisionally recognised, but which were obliged to accept
mandatory tutelage. Like the ‘ordinary’ protectorates and colonies, they had
no minorities treaties and no legally-constituted minorities: the protection of
various religious and other groups which enabled France to justify its presence
in Syria was not expressed in these terms. The mandate charter obliged the
mandatory to favour local autonomies (Article 1); to guarantee the personal
status and religious interests of diverse populations (Article 6); to prevent
unequal treatment of the inhabitants on the grounds of race, religion or lan-
guage, and to protect the right of each community to keep its own schools
(Article. 8) - though the latter article does not define ‘community’; and men-
tions only the right to instruction in each community’s own language, not
religion. These and other articles provided legal justifications for France to
impose or encourage divisions within Syrian society; but none of them refer to
‘minorities’. 5 This highlights the fact that at the outset of the mandate, French
actors did not necessarily think of Syrian society in terms of a majority and
minorities. The charter had been composed by a partly French commission,
with French interests in mind. Yet this commission saw no minorities in Syria,
even as minorities treaties were becoming an established part of League-related
international law.

Thus, mandates, like colonies, had no legally-constituted minorities. 6 They
did, however, have recognition from the League (and therefore its members,
mandatory powers included) that they would sooner or later accede to the
status of independent nation-states: through a treaty of independence to be
signed with the mandatory, in the first instance, then recognised by the League.
When negotiations for such a treaty took place, in the 1930s, Syrian nation-
alists hoped to raise Syria to the rank of the new states that had avoided the
indignity of the mandate. But achieving formal independence and membership
of the League of Nations would also place Syria under the developing body of
international law that had arisen to regulate the accession to membership
of new states - which included the minorities treaties. This opened the pos-
sibility to France of granting Syria ‘independence’ while reserving the right
to intervene on behalf of the newly specified minorities. For certain political
actors belonging to these communities, meanwhile, it offered the possibility of
appealing to a higher authority than the Syrian government, be it the League,
France, or another power. Both possibilities were unwelcome to nationalists,
who opposed any external limit on the authority of the state within its own
borders.

134 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

This was the international context - of minorities treaties and the League of
Nations - in which the negotiations for a Franco-Syrian treaty occurred, and a
treaty was (eventually) signed then revised, though never fully ratified. I have
discussed that context here to avoid an error easily made in studies in impe-
rial history, especially those focusing on a single colony or a single empire:
the assumption that the only international relationship that mattered for the
colonial state and its inhabitants was that with metropole.

Previous accounts of the Franco-Syrian treaty negotiations, the treaty
itself and its gradual failure, have rightly highlighted the controversial role
of minorities clauses. But they have tended to consider the treaty largely as
a bilateral affair, with France on one side and Syria on the other. 7 Taken
at face value, the title of the treaty suggests this reading. But the treaty was
more than simply bilateral. It was meant to take effect at the end of a transi-
tion period marked by Syria’s admission to the League, 8 and therefore of the
international community of nation-states; it built on established precedents
for recognising states’ independence, including treaties signed directly between
the ‘new’ nation-states and the League, as well as between mandate states and
mandatory powers.

Existing accounts have noted some of this: they recognise the relevance
of the Iraqi precedent, for example, or mention (however passingly) the link
between the treaty and Syria’s admission to the League. 9 But minorities clauses
only acquired such importance in the treaty negotiations because of this wider
context provided by the League of Nations, the global order it represented, and
the international public discourse that developed around them - not because
Syrian society was already divided into a majority demanding independence
and numerous minorities that needed protecting (or not). It was the debate
about the treaty that gave meaning to the terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ in
Syria, as actors on all sides referred to the wider context and invoked its prec-
edents and principles to argue their case. There was nothing self-evident about
the adoption of this language. Through the debate over the terms of Syria’s
accession to independence, certain groups in Syrian society came to be consti-
tuted, by themselves or others, as minorities and a majority - a reconstitution
that was of more than merely terminological significance.

From Mandate to Independence: L’Asie frangaise Discovers ‘Minorities’

in Syria

French officials had been aware from the beginning of the mandate that
Syrians would judge them partly according to how Britain governed neigh-
bouring countries. In 1921 High Commissioner Gouraud wrote to Aristide
Briand that ‘if the countries of the neighbouring English [sic] zones have native
governments, subject to a single and relative control by the Mandatory Power,
the more evolved Syrian elements will demand an analogous regime at the

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 135

least ’. 10 As Gouraud predicted, the British mandates became a reference point
for Syrians protesting against the divisions France had imposed on the territo-
ries under its control. Britain granted a nominal independence to Transjordan
in 1928 and terminated its mandate for Iraq in 1930; under the provisions of
the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi treaty, Iraq joined the League in 1932, putting pressure
on France to follow a similar policy in Syria. Against this pressure for a treaty,
minorities became one of the principal means by which the French planned to
maintain their influence in the country.

This was not because minorities simply existed in Syria, although the con-
ditions for their emergence were much more developed by the early 1930s
then they had been a decade earlier. Rather, it was because the category had
become important within the developing body of international public law that
informed the debate about a Franco-Syrian treaty, and later the treaty itself.
This international legal context influenced French thinking about a treaty, and
encouraged French officers and officials to apply the term to certain groups
within Syrian society, where previously they would have used other concepts.
The shift is visible in the coverage given to Syria by L’Asie frangaise, the bul-
letin of the Comite de l’Asie frangaise - one of four related committees set up
between 1890 and 1910 to lobby for French colonial expansion . 11 Closely con-
nected with the most influential figures in the large, cross-party colonial lobby
in parliament, these committees were the heart of the parti colonial in France.
They drew in diplomats, colonial officials and military officers serving in the
colonies, and received support from a much larger interested public in the
metropole; but their officers, financing and policies came largely from French
business circles with interests in the colonies.

The Comite de l’Asie frangaise had originally been founded to press for
French expansion in southeast Asia, but moved towards a preference for estab-
lishing French ‘spheres of influence’ and indirect rule in the continent, includ-
ing the Ottoman Empire and Persia 12 - a policy well suited for adaptation to
the strictures of the mandatory role. The committee’s bulletin was edited until
1919 by Robert de Caix, and thereafter by Henri Froidevaux, a specialist in
colonial geography and history and indefatigable publicist for French colonial-
ism . 13 It was read, and frequently written, by colonial officials; in addition, it
often reported on the activities of colonial officials and concerned politicians in
France, sometimes quoting them at length. The bulletin can therefore be taken
as broadly representative of currents of opinion within French colonialist
circles more widely; it also offers the historian a continuity of coverage across
the whole period that can be hard to assemble from archival data or from
one-off publications such as books. Within the limits of the bulletin’s editorial
policy, it thus gives an insight into the colonial debate as it developed over
time. The direct links between the L’Asie frangaise and the French mandate
are, in any case, many. Robert de Caix, who in 1919 went from being its
editor to being Secretary-General of the High Commission in Beirut, and from

13 6 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

there became France’s (and Syria’s) representative to the League’s Permanent
Mandates Commission, is only the most noteworthy. 14

L’Asie frangaise’s interest in the Levant pre-dated the mandate. During
the First World War, the bulletin published many articles on the region and
France’s interests (even ‘rights’) there. 15 It paid special attention to the wartime
Ottoman government’s mistreatment of its own population, particularly
Christians. The term ‘minority’ was not applied to Ottoman Armenians,
Greeks and others, however: rather than persecuting ‘minorities’, the Young
Turk government was perceived to ‘have decided to settle the questions posed
by the existence in the Ottoman Empire of allogenous populations by the
suppression, pure and simple, of the latter’; 16 or, again, to be planning ‘the
destruction of the Christian nationalities which, in the minds of the Young
Turks and their German advisers were to be suppressed as posing an obstacle
to the turkification of the Ottoman Empire’. 17 On the one hand, this makes
sense: even at this late stage the empire was not a nation-state and had no
‘majority’; ‘minority’ in the modern meaning was only just coming into use in
any context. On the other hand, while we may question whether the Ottoman
Christian communities constituted ‘nationalities’, they certainly were not
‘allogenous’, or non-native, to the empire. 18

At the end of the war, the notion of legally protecting (national) minorities
in the states created or expanded by the peace settlement, and making interna-
tional recognition of those states dependent on that protection, became wide-
spread. As it appears in L’Asie frangaise, this development is clearly linked to
the establishment of the League of Nations - even before the League itself was
founded: the Ottoman regime could not be preserved in Anatolia, wrote the
bulletin in its first issue after the armistice, because

it has shown itself to be incompatible with the improvement of the lot of the Turkish
peasants themselves, and would be even more so with the loyal play \jeu loyal ] of the
guarantees that the group of Allies, embryo of the future League of Nations, wishes
to ensure for the national minorities, Hellenic and others . 19

This is the first mention of ‘minorities’ I encountered in my survey of arti-
cles about the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Levant in L’Asie frangaise, and it
refers not to the former Arab provinces but to the contest of nationalisms in
Anatolia. It is worth repeating here that the post-war minorities treaties that
created the legal category from which the wider (and more indiscriminate)
modern usage of the term derives generally restricted themselves to national
minorities, most often understood as groups identified with one nation-state
but resident in another. In the Anatolian case this applied to the Greeks, identi-
fied as a national minority here, because there was an independent Greek state
- which, as it happened, was one of the Allies. 20 But Syria was different: ‘There,
in the Arabic-speaking countries, it is not nationalities but religious groups

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 137

that a traditional opposition divides in almost as serious a way.’ 21 More perti-
nently, there was no internationally-recognised independent Arab nation-state;
the point of this article was to press France’s claim for ‘our fair share of the
mandates that will be conferred on Western tutors’. 22 The bulletin did justify
the French claim to Syria by reference to the League, but at this point protect-
ing minorities was not presented as part of the task of the mandate in Syria,
though it was recognised as an important function of the League elsewhere.
There was no nation in Syria, said the bulletin: the country

has neither the civic education nor above all the unity required to constitute, in the
aftermath of Turkish oppression, a nation governing itself in full independence;
there, as elsewhere in the Orient, before calling peoples to exercise the right to self-
determination, they must be constituted P

Unsurprisingly, therefore, there were no national minorities either.

In the early years of the mandate, the bulletin’s articles about Syria contin-
ued in this vein: the League context was explicitly taken to enframe the French
mission in Syria, but without reference to minorities. Since Syria was not yet a
‘nation’, nor independent, the newly-established legal category of minority did
not apply there. The keynote was rather the dividedness of Syrian society as a
justification for the mandate. The divisions could be religious, ethnic, ‘racial’,
regional or any combination of these, but articles usually followed the 1920
assessment of the editor, Flenri Froidevaux: while noting ‘the multitude and
. . . the diversity of the races of Syria’, and without forgetting that ‘languages
as well as races must be taken into account’, ‘how little importance these
factors present next to the religious factor!’ 24 This was why the ‘heavy task of
presiding over the raising-up of Syria’ was a delicate one.

Against this picture of division, the French presence (‘a gentle, benevolent,
and educative tutelage . . . leading the country gradually to prosperity, to
liberty while waiting for independence’ 25 ) was usually justified by reference to
the League and the ‘heavy task’ that France had accepted from it: it added an
appealing new dimension to the older notion of an imperial mission civilisa-
trice. It should be emphasised, though, that invoking the League was not just
a rhetorical strategy: the mandate was what made the French occupation of
Syria legal under international (and internationally recognised) law. It also
provided an external guarantee of Syria’s existence as a state. In this context
it is significant that these frequent references to the League rarely include
mention of minorities, despite the new body of international law that the
League was supervising on the protection of minorities in newly-independent
states. To labour the point, this was because Syria was not independent. The
Minorities Commission was concerned with overseeing the application of
the minorities treaties; Syrian questions at the League were dealt with by the
Permanent Mandates Commission.

138 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

The French depiction of Syrian society as hopelessly divided would remain
constant in L’Asie frangaise throughout this period, but it was not until the
aftermath of the 1925-7 revolt that the bulletin began more systematically to
attach the concept of minority to those perceived divisions. Still tightly bound
to the League context, the concept could be used to justify French policies such
as the territorial division of Syria:

pretending to impose another method [the creation of a unitary state], wishing to
drown the voice of the minorities in an electoral consultation common to the entire
territory of the Mandate, is to support a policy that is not in harmony with the
obligations that the facts, and the terms of the Mandate, make for the Mandatory
Power . 26

References to Syrian ‘minorities’ became more frequent in the years after
the revolt, usually, though not exclusively, referring to religious communities.
But the term by no means displaced other categories (‘religious community’,
‘nationality’, ‘race’). Rather, it slotted into the existing discourse to comple-
ment them, as in a long article on ‘Nationalities and Arab nationalism in
the Near East’: this recognised ethnolinguistic communities such as Turks or
Kurds, but only applied the terms minority and majority to religious groups,
whether in Syria, Lebanon or Iraq. For the latter two, it used the term ‘Arab’
more or less explicitly as a synonym for arabophone Sunni Muslim: in Iraq,
‘the majority ... is Shi'ite and there are barely 900,000 Arabs out of a total of
over two million arabophones ’. 27

Moreover, the term’s application remained scattershot. It only became
systematic - if not overnight, then from one year to the next - in 1933: thereaf-
ter, L’Asie frangaise’ s interest in the Levant focused on the question of minori-
ties, so defined. To give a rough, but not entirely unscientific, estimate of the
scale of the change: I surveyed twenty-five years’ worth of the bulletin’s articles
on the Levant, from 1915 to the end of 1939, looking for material relevant to
the question of minorities - that is, any articles about communities that would
today be called minorities . 28 My notes on the period 1915-32 run to seventy
pages, and the term itself appears infrequently. For the years 1933-9 - a period
barely more than a third as long - they run to just over seventy pages, and the
term is extremely common . 29 What had changed?

The difference can be explained quite simply. Once Iraq had been admit-
ted to the League of Nations in autumn 1932, French intentions in Syria came
under greater scrutiny in Geneva . 30 In Syria, too, Iraq’s admission to the League
focused attention on France’s plans. Before 1933, the French preference was
for its mandate over Syria to continue indefinitely. After 1933, this gave way to
a grudging acknowledgement that to ensure the continued stability of French
control, France would have to follow - or at least, seem willing to follow -
Britain’s example by putting an end to the mandate, granting independence,

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 139

and backing Syrian membership of the League . 31 The text of a treaty had been
drafted in Paris in 1931; in early 1933 the High Commissioner Ponsot sought
to resurrect it, unsuccessfully, but a little later his successor, Martel, managed
to get it signed by the Syrian government - not without heavy pressure, even
though that government was a ‘moderate’ one . 32 Although the 1933 treaty
was blocked by the National Bloc in the Syrian parliament (which Martel duly
suspended), for the rest of the 1930s the question regarding a treaty leading to
Syrian independence was ‘when?’ rather than ‘if . . ,’. 33

This meant that the entire body of League-derived law regarding the inde-
pendence of new nation-states, including the law on ‘minorities’, did now
apply to Syria - or would soon. It would replace the mandate law, under
which, as L’Asie frangaise had pointed out,

the rights and duties that result for the Mandatory from the Declaration of the
Mandate, instrument of application of article 22 of the Charter, are the common
affair of it [that is, the Mandatory] and the League of Nations alone \ne sont affaire
qu’entre lui et la Societe des Nations] and do not depend on the consent of the
countries which are entrusted to the Mandate. 34

France’s ‘rights’ in Syria would be more limited as a friend and ally than as a
mandatory power, but the new body of law provided possibilities for asserting
them nonetheless. Particularly as it applied, in theory and in practice, to Iraq,
this body of law now formed the framework for the writers of L’Asie frangaise
to construct their vision of the future French role in Syria. It is important to
understand that this framework was more than a handy rhetorical vehicle
for French imperialism (though it was certainly used as one): it also gave
juridical form to the new categories of the modern period - among them the
nation-state, national independence, and minority.

The implications of this were clear to the writers of L’Asie frangaise, and
at least implicit in their treatment of this newly topical question. Over the
next years the bulletin sought to keep its readers informed of ‘the precarious
situation’ of certain ‘groups in which France had the duty not to lose inter-
est [dont la France a le devoir de ne pas se desinteresser]’. 35 On the grounds
that they were ‘minorities’, it lobbied for legal guarantees to be applied to
these groups, subject to a higher authority than the Syrian government. This
could involve extending the understanding of the term: arguing for communal
electoral representation for Circassians, for example, who had not previously
been considered a minority: ‘Syrian nationalist circles have not been minded
to recognize rights particular to the Tcherkess minority, under the pretext that
they are Sunni Muslims like the Muslim majority .’ 36 The anonymous writer of
these lines, described as an ‘eminent personality’, did not mention that a few
years earlier the mandatory authorities had used precisely the same ‘pretext’
to avoid granting such recognition . 37 At that time the disadvantages of doing

140 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

so evidently outweighed the benefits; but the new context of anticipated Syrian
independence made it worthwhile to revisit the issue, at least. Interest in the
Circassians soon waned, however: while this article lamented that Syria’s 1930
organic statute ‘only recognizes the right of representation of confessional
minorities ’, 38 L’Asie frangaise’s own coverage of minorities remained heavily
weighted towards religious groups.

In this question, Iraq during and after the British mandate was important
not simply as a point of comparison, but because Iraq’s independence set a
legal precedent on which the French in Syria were expected to draw. In the
mid-1930s L’Asie frangaise returned frequently to the situation in Iraq, partic-
ularly the situation of those groups now defined as its minorities. It usually did
so to draw unsubtle implications for Syria. Whether discussing Iraq directly or
referring to it in articles on Syria, L’Asie frangaise ’ s assessment of that prece-
dent was that it had been altogether too hasty. Its readers, the bulletin asserted
in June 1933, would remember

the fine promises made to the national minorities of Iraq, at the time of that king-
dom’s admission to the League of Nations, and the haste with which, to give satis-
faction to England, the [League] assembly declared that admission, without taking
account of the wise recommendations of the Mandates Commission . 39

Fine promises notwithstanding, the Iraqi military was currently ‘in the
process, with the collaboration of the British air force, of exterminating
the Kurds subjected to their domination’, because they had asserted ‘the
safeguarding of rights and the respect of liberties which have been solemnly
guaranteed them by international pacts ’. 40 The following issue returned to
Iraq’s national minorities, this time talking about a group who would inter-
est the bulletin more than the Kurds over the coming years because they
were Christian: the Assyrians . 41 For L’Asie frangaise, their mistreatment by
the Baghdad government, enthusiastically applauded by the Muslim popula-
tion, posed questions: ‘is Iraq truly capable of governing itself, and would
it not be more suitable to place it back among the A-mandate countries ?’ 42
The point being drawn for the Syrian treaty was obvious, and explicitly
argued:

It is not fitting ... at the moment when the well-known events have just taken place
in Iraq, to deliver Syria’s national minorities to the mercy of the Arab majority;
instructed by experience, the League of Nations will surely not permit it, and such an
action would be contrary to all of our country’s traditions . 43

Between the failure of the 1933 treaty and the initially successful signature
of a treaty in 1936 - this time negotiated on the Syrian side by a nationalist
delegation rather than a ‘moderate’ government - L’Asie frangaise returned

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 141

frequently to the Iraqi case. In December 1933 it described the conflict between
the Assyrians and Iraqi government forces, ‘whose origin is difficult to unravel,
but which certainly seems, in one region, to have turned into systematic mas-
sacre’; it then reproduced the ten-article declaration on the protection of
minorities made to the League by Iraq, but with no external guarantor, upon
termination of the mandate in 1932. 44 More articles on the Assyrians, in both
Iraq and in Syria, followed. 45 They were joined in November 1935 by the
Yazidis:

The conflict with the Assyrians of Iraq [having] hardly eased, another minority of
Mesopotamia in its turn becomes the victim of the haste with which the English had
the independence of Iraq proclaimed by the L.O.N., without worrying themselves
about the fate of the populations living on the ground and practicing another religion
than that of Mahomet . 46

Conflict had broken out between the Iraqi state and the Yazidis of the Jabal
Sinjar region on the Syrian frontier over the latter’s refusal ‘to have themselves
enrolled on the army register, as the law on military service recently voted by
the Baghdad Parliament order[ed]’; martial law had been proclaimed and a
punitive column sent to crush resistance. The article’s subtext is so clear it is
virtually a headline:

One cannot . . . not notice that under the British mandate the Yazidis lived very
peacefully, and have only become agitated under the Iraqi regime. One thus finds
oneself led to wonder if they have enjoyed the same religious tolerance under the
Arab kings as under the regime of the mandate.

The next month the point was repeated after a number of Yazidis - and two
Assyrians - had received harsh sentences from a military court in Mosul, with
the bulletin quoting the French-language newspaper La Syrie to ask ‘if minori-
ties are really defended in Iraq and if the guarantees of the League are anything
other than scraps of paper’. 47

These articles were supporting evidence in L’Asie frangaise’s campaign
either to forestall the signing of a Franco-Syrian treaty, or to ensure that such a
treaty contained the minorities clauses - permitting continued outside involve-
ment - that the British-Iraqi treaty had lacked. When the decision came, in
1936, to negotiate a treaty with a delegation dominated by the National Bloc,
L’Asie frangaise stated its position clearly:

The Iraqi precedent can provide a good basis for examination and we accept it as
such; but it must not be forgotten that it consists not only in a text but also in its
application, which has rendered certain precautions necessary and legitimate, as
much in the eyes of the League of Nations as of France . 48

142 . ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

This quote comes from an article published in March 1936; its coverage of the
French decision to negotiate is a hastily-added afterword to an article about
the widespread unrest in Syria - the ‘nouvelle crise’ of the title - that led to that
decision. Two more articles on Syria reinforced the point the following month.
If the negotiations had now begun, both sides had already recognised ‘the
necessity of a comprehensive treaty between France and Syria, [and] also how
the principles set out by the L.O.N. must be applied to the minorities of the
country ’. 49 The bulletin also observed that ‘as of now, certain apprehensions
are manifesting themselves among the minority groups ’. 50

Despite this seeming clarity, many aspects of the ‘minorities question’
remained confused in the bulletin’s coverage of the negotiations, the treaty’s
signature and its slow demise over the three years to 1939. 51 These points
of confusion are echoed in other primary sources for the period, on both
the French and Syrian sides, and in some cases in the historiography of the
mandate as well. Earlier, L’Asie frangaise had at least sometimes referred
to Syrian ethnolinguistic communities as minorities; but by the later 1930s,
in its discussions of the actual Franco-Syrian treaty, it only mentioned reli-
gious minorities. When the issue of modifying the 1936 treaty came up, as
it frequently did, the question of minorities was always cited as the major
sticking point, but the groups concerned were always religious groups . 52 (The
bulletin’s authoritative diagnosis of Syria’s needs was slightly undermined by
the fact that it consistently misspelt the name of Syria’s prime minister, Jamil
Mardam, as ‘Mardan’ throughout this period - and up until January 1939,
shortly before his resignation.) When the bulletin explained the need for added
guarantees for minorities it always did so with reference to Christians first . 53
More, the frequent references to Christians in its coverage of the situation
in Syria in 1936-9 are to the Christians of the Jazira - mostly recent immi-
grants or refugees from Turkey and Iraq - rather than the various arabophone
Christian communities dispersed through the ‘Arab’ cities and agricultural
areas of western Syria, or the Armenians who were mostly settled in the cities
(principally Aleppo ). 54 The precise place of the ‘Alawis and the Druzes in the
minorities question, meanwhile, was never quite clear.

Nevertheless, the example of L’Asie frangaise demonstrates the develop-
ment of the language of minorities in French discourse about Syria, showing
the links between its development and Syria’s status in international law.
This language was well established by the time of the 1936 treaty. It was not
without its inconsistencies and blind spots, but there is nothing troubling to
the historian in these: they are inherent to the category of minority itself, as
a subjective rather than an objective category. It would be a great deal more
surprising to encounter consistency.

The process outlined above explains why the term was adopted in Syria, as
elsewhere. As a body of international public law relating to the independence
of new nation-states emerged, a subset of it - the minorities treaties - emerged

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 143

to address one of the problems posed by the establishment of such states. Since
nation-states were developing in other parts of the world too, and posing
the same problems, groups not touched by the central and eastern European
minorities treaties began to demand similar protections. Syria was one such
place, especially once the question of its ‘independence’ arose. This explains
how Syrians, too, came to use the term, but not the specific reasons why they
used it. In the next part of the chapter I outline some of the ways in which
members of such groups, both ‘minoritarianist’ 55 and nationalist, chose to use
the term - among others - in the debate about a Franco-Syrian treaty, and
what motivated them to do so.

Syrian Uses of the Language of Minorities

When Syrians contributed to the debate about minorities clauses - in news-
paper articles, petitions to the League of Nations or correspondence with the
High Commission - they were doing several different things. First, implicitly or
explicitly, they sought to define who was a minority, either saying ‘community
X is a minority’ or ‘a minority is community X’. Second, and more interest-
ingly, they argued for communities defined as minorities to be treated in a
certain way - defining what the category of minority should mean. By apply-
ing that category to the communities they claimed to speak for, they sought to
redefine those communities, notably in relation to the state: this was part of
a wider debate in Syria over the institutional form that should be given to the
relationship between state and population. Third, they put forward a vision of
legitimate authority within their own communities. With a little digging, this
rich content can be excavated quite easily - provided that we understand that
the category of minority was not a neutral, descriptive label.

This section considers several examples in detail to show how they work on
these different levels. Illustrating each analytical point with a different example
would have been quite possible, but returning to the same examples allows
us to understand the ‘thickness’ of the debate, the many meanings contained
in any given mobilisation on the part of one particular group or individual.
Most of these examples come from members of communities that were being
redefined as minorities, crossing a number of minoritarianist viewpoints with
the nationalist counter-arguments made by Edmond Rabbath, a prominent
nationalist Christian.

We have already met Ignace Nouri, who wrote to High Commissioner Damien
de Martel during the 1936 negotiations expressing his confidence that they
would result in a treaty containing ‘certain clauses and bonds for the protection
of the minorities, that is to say the Christians and Jews’. 56 A group of Catholic
bishops, writing to Martel just before the negotiations began, approached
the issue from the other direction: whereas Nouri started with the concept of

144 J T/;e Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

minority and then explicitly took it to mean non-Muslim religious communi-
ties, these clerics introduced themselves as ‘leaders and representatives of the
Christian communities’ 57 and then used ‘minorities’ as an implicit synonym for
‘Christian communities’. While they expressed the desire ‘of each of us to see
his country evolve towards independence and acquire a place in the concert
of nations equal to that of other countries’, and stated that ‘the patriotism of
the minorities cannot be doubted’, they also asserted that that patriotism must
‘square with the measures of protection indispensable so that harmony may
always exist between all nationals without distinction of religion’. The purely
religious understanding of the term is evident. 58 The nationalist delegation in
Paris, they said, could not claim to represent minorities.

Other Christian figures had already pushed the definition of the term
beyond the circle of Christian communities. In late 1932, receiving a cour-
tesy visit from a French official, the papal delegate to Syria and Tebanon,
Monsignor Giannini, ‘addressed spontaneously and in the most precise terms
the question of the Christian minorities in Syria’. 59 At issue was the place of
minorities in the treaty that was then thought to be forthcoming: Giannini
insisted that the Christians should be protected by (French) external guarantee.
But ‘Lastly, this time in terms lacking in precision, Mgr Giannini indicated
that he would wish this guarantee to be extended also to the “other minori-
ties”.’ Whether he meant non-Christian religious minorities, ethnolinguistic
minorities, or both, is unclear.

Two months earlier, in conversation with the French intelligence services,
a secular Christian figure had been more specific as he sought to widen the
application of the term: ‘Latif Ghanime, Syrian-Catholic deputy for Aleppo,
deeming that the principal task of the next government - of which he expects
to be a part - will be the conclusion of a treaty, emphasises the importance of
the question of minorities.’ 60 For Ghanime as for Giannini, what had given
the question of minorities its importance was the prospect of a Franco-Syrian
treaty and Syrian independence. As we saw at the start of the chapter, it
was with an eye on the future discussion of minorities clauses in the Syrian
parliament that he proposed a broader legal application of the term:

Latif Ghanime also fears that the numerical weakness of Christian representation
in the Syrian Chamber - aggravated by the fact that the Orthodox deputies for
Damascus and Hama cannot be counted on in practice - may render very precarious
the parliamentary base necessary for the discussion of the problem. He is therefore
disposed to understand ‘minorities’ in the broad sense, ethic [sic - ethique] rather
than religious, and range among the minoritarians the Kurdish deputies of the North
and the Djezireh, the Tcherkess deputy of Kuneitra, even Soubhi bey Barakat and the
deputies of the Sanjak of Alexandretta as representatives of the ‘Turks’. Here again,
he does not seem to be quite in line with \il ne semble pas rejoindre entierement ] the
views of his Patriarchate.

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 145

Unlike the Christian clergymen mentioned above, then, Ghanime stretched the
term to cover ethnolinguistic as well as religious minorities . 61

Ethnolinguistic communities were in fact quite capable of seeing for them-
selves the advantages that a treaty might bring them if they had official minor-
ity status. A few months after Ghanime made his suggestions, with French
policy still focused - unsuccessfully, at this point - on getting a treaty signed,
Circassian notables in the predominantly Circassian muhafaza of Qunaytra
forwarded a petition to their fellows in Homs. It was addressed to the High
Commissioner; the French Surete generale reported that it ‘demands that the
future Treaty guarantee the rights of minorities’ and listed what the Circassians
considered those rights to be . 62 Although the Surete claimed that Circassian
notables in Homs ‘hesitate to sign this mazbata which they find useless and
untimely’, it was almost certainly the same petition that was sent to the High
Commissioner less than two weeks later signed by prominent Circassians from
Qunaytra and the region of Hama as well as Homs. 63 1 cited this in Chapter
3, and mentioned in passing that it came in the context of a treaty. In fact, the
petition’s wording is very clear: ‘on the occasion of the forthcoming end of
the Syrian mandate, and its replacement by the treaty between the French and
Syrian Republics’, the signatories wrote that ‘the Circassians resident in Syria’
had claimed and would continue to claim ‘recognition of their national minor-
ity rights [huquqihim al-aqalliyya al-jinsiyya] as a community having its own
race, language and traditions different from those of the Syrian majority ’. 64

These examples offer a range of definitions of the term ‘minority’: a purely
religious meaning attached to Christians and Jews; an emphasis on Christian
communities, but a willingness to apply it to unspecified other minorities; a
definition that starts with religious communities, but specifically stretches to
include ethnic minorities; and a definition that comes from (and only covers)
an ethnolinguistic minority. These different uses hint at the range of groups to
which it could be applied. Some other religiously- and linguistically-defined
groups, such as Isma'ilis or Kurds, made similar claims . 65 Yet others to which
the term could have applied seem not to have used it much. The stream of peti-
tions from ‘Alawis and Druzes to the Teague reached its peak flow during the
treaty negotiations of 1933 and 1936, motivated by a desire to fix the status
of these communities and their regions relative to an independent Syria. But
it focused on whether the statelets attributed to each community should be
part of a unitary Syria or not, and neither pro- nor anti-unitarians seem to
have used the term ‘minority’ to describe themselves, for reasons discussed in
Chapter 2.

It is unsurprising that there were different and inconsistent applications
of the term: in fact, consistency would be more surprising. As I observed in
Chapter 1, my concern in this book is not with whether ‘minority’ is an objec-
tively valid category of analysis nor with defining particular Syrian groups as
minorities myself. Rather, I am interested in how and why particular actors

146 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

used it at the time - as they would not have done only a few years earlier - and
what specific historical conditions made the term meaningful for them. Syria’s
legal redefinition as a nation-state, first under mandate and then (putatively)
independent, was partly responsible for creating those conditions, as the term’s
sudden importance in the debate about the treaty shows.

But for what reasons did Syrians choose to use it? Having stated that such-
and-such a community was a minority, what meaning did they seek to give to
the term? We have already seen that they thought it should imply a community
having certain externally-guaranteed rights, and at need, protection. The rights
different groups sought to guarantee for their communities, as minorities,
involved a redefinition of those communities’ relationship to the state.

Latif Ghanime, for example, wanted the minorities to have ‘not only a
[defined legal] status, but guarantees coming from the exterior, and in their
absence would prefer an indefinite continuation of the mandate ’. 66 He there-
fore requested that the text of any treaty drawn up by France be passed unof-
ficially to the Christian deputies in the Syrian parliament before reaching the
parliament as a whole, so that they could ‘make their observations heard,
and refine [perfectionner] the guarantees offered’. If the text were discussed
from the outset by the parliament in plenary session, Ghanime feared that
any minority clauses would be ‘taken ... by the extremists as a maximum
to be beaten down ’, 67 making it difficult for him and his Christian colleagues
to request stronger protection. If passing the text directly to the Christian
deputies were impossible, Ghanime suggested that it could be communicated
to them via the Patriarchs - though his own, Monsignor Tappouni, was
apparently unenthusiastic.

As should be clear from the earlier quote about minorities in parliament,
meanwhile, Ghanime was afraid that if only Christians were covered by the
proposed clauses, the ‘minorities’ might be in too much of a minority to make
their voices heard. Better, therefore, to widen the definition of the term to
ensure that a sufficient number of deputies would feel that they had an inter-
est in defending minority clauses . 68 But this implied redefining a number of
communities - Kurds, Circassians, even Turks - as minorities: a redefinition
that would change their formal relationship to the state, and by extension to
the ‘majority’.

The example of the Circassian notables shows that some members of such
communities were making similar claims for themselves. The purpose of their
petition was ‘to demand the following articles in the forthcoming Treaty’: a list
of ten, which I outlined in the earlier chapter, covering issues like guaranteed
representation ‘for the Circassian minority’ in parliament and in state jobs,
access to and control over (Circassian-medium) education, participation in
the state Waqf administration, and various other cultural freedoms . 69 More
Circassian mobilisations as a minority occurred in the period 1936-9. A peti-
tion from March 1936, just after the French had put an end to serious unrest

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 147

in Syria by agreeing to negotiate a treaty with a nationalist delegation, asserts
the Circassians’ loyalty to France and alludes to the risks that this has entailed.
It does not list specific rights they should be guaranteed in the treaty, but it is
specific about both the diplomatic context and its desire for explicit French
protection:

We know very well, Your Excellence, that noble France will never abandon us;
but we come, by this request [bi- c dridatina hadhihi], following recent events and
the likelihood of the signing of a treaty between your state and Syria, to ask that
Your Excellence work effectively to protect the rights of minorities including our
Circassian race [wa minha ‘ unsuruna al-sharkasl ] in the treaty . . . and to take them
under French protection . 70

Another petition comes from 1938, by which time the National Bloc
government elected under the treaty regime was floundering - in large part
because of French obstructiveness. The Bloc was under constant French pres-
sure to revise the 1936 treaty by, among other things, adding greater minority
protection. In this context, a group of Circassian notables from Homs 71 sent
a long statement to the High Commission, to be communicated to the Quai
d’Orsay and to the League of Nations. It started, as such statements com-
monly did, with a history lesson, stating that ‘despite [their] forced exodus,
and after long years’, the Circassians had maintained their sense of communal
cohesion in exile. 72 ‘The Tcherkesses still conserve their national customs, their
language, their habits, their civilisation; and this thanks to their own schools,
their writings, their associations, which prove their attachment to their social
existence.’ The statement explained the community’s previous attempts to
have its communal existence formally recognised under the mandate, notably
in 1925, 1934 and prior to the signature of the 1936 treaty. ‘Despite all these
petitions, the Tcherkesses have noted with regret and emotion that the Treaty
included no articles safeguarding their rights and recognizing them as those of
a national minority in Syria.’

As Syria was supposedly in a transitional period to full independence under
the terms of the treaty, they were now lobbying for it to be revised in their
favour: the Circassians

do not want to run the risk of being aggressed by the ‘Majority’ of their compatri-
ots, which will surely happen since Tcherkess youth has spilled its blood to show
its attachment to its national principles and its sympathies towards the mandatory
power.

They adduced a number of incidents of tension between ‘the Tcherkess minor-
ity and the “Majority”’ in the Faysali and mandate periods, as well as citing
the case of the Assyrians in Iraq, to support their claim for the Circassians to

148 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

be recognised as an ‘ethnic minority’ by the treaty and afforded protection
accordingly. That protection should take the form of eleven explicitly-stated
rights: the first ten were more or less the same as those outlined five years
earlier; the eleventh was French oversight ensuring that the others were acted
upon.

Whether they were arguing for or against them, when political actors
debated the granting of defined minority rights of this kind they were taking
part in a wider debate about the relationship of state and population. The
discussion over the distribution of seats on representative bodies is only the
most obvious example: Circassians requesting a particular kind of relationship
between state authority and their community, in which Circassians were rep-
resented in the Syrian parliament as members of a Circassian minority rather
than Syrian Muslims, or even simply Syrians; Latif Ghanime seeking to define
and represent any number of religious and ethnic minorities in the same way.
Such a measure would fix the boundaries of these communities: anyone allot-
ted to the Circassian electoral college would ‘be’ a Circassian in the state’s
eyes, regardless of, for example, his or her language of ordinary use, habitual
manner of dressing, or place of residence. Likewise, a member of the Syrian-
Catholic college would ‘be’ a Syrian-Catholic regardless of whether or not he
or she was religiously observant or even a believer. Without this state ‘fixing’,
the boundaries between communities would be rather more fluid; communities
themselves would not have external coherence.

These communal identities would be non-territorial: a Circassian would
be a Circassian wherever he or she voted. Other suggestions for parliamen-
tary representation were territorial, but likewise concerned themselves with
defining the relationship between population and state. At least in the case
of the Jabal Druze and the Alaouites, for example, L’Asie frangaise argued
for allocating seats to distinct territories (that is, gerrymandering). The aim
of guaranteeing representation to particular communities was the same - the
justification was that any ‘electoral consultation common to the entire terri-
tory’ would be a deliberate attempt to ‘drown the voice of the minorities’ - but
the effect on the institutional relationship of population and state would be
different . 73 Provided they wanted to vote along communal lines, for example,
this arrangement might benefit ‘Alawi voters within the circumscription of the
Alaouites. But that advantage would not stretch to an ‘Alawi peasant living
just beyond the internal frontier in the muhafaza of Homs. Nationalists, mean-
while, thought that any of these positions meant allowing the amplified voice
of the minorities to drown out the majority.

Edmond Rabbath did not discuss the subject of parliamentary representa-
tion when, at the end of 1932, he drew up a policy on minorities clauses to
guide the National Bloc leadership in treaty negotiations . 74 But in his study
of the question, the Christian nationalist intellectual from Aleppo touched
on many other controversial topics in the debate about the institutional

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 149

relationship between population and state. Among them was whether the
presidency of the Syrian republic would be open to any citizen or restricted
to members of one community: his answer, no doubt controversial, was that
as part of the process of guaranteeing the rights of minorities in the treaty
of Syrian independence, the article of the constitution stipulating that the
president be a Muslim should be abrogated.

Rabbath addressed another question which we have already encountered,
and frequently: access to state jobs. The minoritarianist Circassians mentioned
above, like other groups discussed in this and earlier chapters, wanted pro-
portionate access to state jobs for their community - especially where those
jobs concerned the community’s own administration, education or policing.
Rabbath, by contrast, argued that recruitment should be ‘carried out by means
of competitive examination [par voie de concours] and with no confessional
distinction^]’. 75 If such French-style exams were marked anonymously one
might consider this a laudable aim; but a non-nationalist might point out
that Rabbath does not specify what language the exams would be written
in, perhaps taking for granted that it would be Arabic. Muslims, meanwhile,
might observe that such a ‘blind’ competition would tend to benefit Christians,
who were more likely to be educated and particularly to have received - like
the Paris-educated lawyer Rabbath himself - a ‘modern’ education of the sort
that such exams would favour. This is not to accuse Rabbath of acting in bad
faith, or slyly seeking advantages for Christians under the cover of national-
ism; it is simply to point out that a nationalist position on these issues, too, is
an attempt to define the relationship between people and state, and one which
would offer advantages and disadvantages to individual citizens.

These are not the artificial quibbles of a picky historian. It was because the
debate over access to state jobs was so hot, at a time when the state apparatus
was expanding, that Rabbath addressed it. 76 Different ways of defining com-
munities had different implications. As we have seen, some Circassians wanted
the right to Circassian-medium education, which would require qualified
teachers literate in Circassian rather than Arabic. This would imply official
status for the language; and a multilingual state, in turn, would by implica-
tion be a different animal than the ‘Arab’ nation-state proposed by the Syrian
nationalists. From the latter’s point of view, the dangers of a liberal language
policy were pressingly illustrated by Alexandretta, where Turkish had official
status. This had contributed to a steady strengthening of ‘Turkish’ identity;
a growing identification, among Turkish speakers, with the Turkish nation-
state over the border; and, in the period under discussion, the sanjak’s gradual
removal from Syria. 77

Another aspect of this question, which the debate over minorities clauses
raised, was the competence of state courts over the entire population. It might
seem obvious to us today that states should have exclusive jurisdiction over
their territory and any person upon it, but this is a view conditioned by the

150 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

age of the nation-state. In Syria’s recent Ottoman past many local inhabitants
had been able to abstract themselves from the Ottoman judicial system by
becoming the proteges of foreign consuls and placing themselves under the
jurisdiction of the mixed courts set up to try cases involving foreign subjects. A
version of these still existed in the mandate period. Rabbath noted that ‘certain
bishops in Aleppo [had] expressed the desire to see the minorities accorded
the right to request to be subject to the tribunals competent in foreign law
[la faculte de demander a etre justiciables des tribunaux statuant en matiere
etrangere]’. Rabbath believed that ‘this demand [was] incompatible with the
quality of Syrian citizens and that it would not be in the interest of the minori-
ties [minoritaires] themselves to raise it’. 78 The first part of this opinion shows
that for Rabbath full citizenship meant full participation in uniform state insti-
tutions: a modern understanding of what it means to belong to a state. The
mixed courts had been a serious obstacle to Ottoman attempts to establish a
common Ottoman citizenship. The second part, meanwhile, suggests that he
understood how unpopular Syrian Christians would make themselves if they
sought to place themselves under extraterritorial jurisdiction - a major source
of tension in the Ottoman period.

This question leads to another: what external authorities had a right of
intervention in the relationship between population and state, and which
parts of the population could invoke it? For the Catholic bishops of Damascus
cited above, ‘The question of minorities goes beyond the framework of an
internal settlement [reglement interne] and appertains to international law’. 79
But the notion that certain citizens of a state could, under international law,
be guaranteed access to an external power has profound implications for the
authority of the state. For nationalists everywhere in this period, limiting the
state’s authority in this way was deplorable - not a rare opinion today. When
the question is phrased in this way - limiting the authority of the state - it
might sound like a good thing, given what states are capable of inflicting on
their populations. But as Edmond Rabbath pointed out, the legal protection of
minorities would tend to disadvantage the establishment of legal equality for
individual citizens. 80

Thus, the debate over minorities clauses was also a debate about the limits
of the authority of the state. In different forms the same debate is a constant
of state politics. That it was particularly intense in this period, when state
authority was expanding and intensifying rapidly in Syria, is unsurprising. In
these circumstances, it is understandable that some Syrians looked beyond the
country’s borders for guarantees of their status, both to international law and
to particular powers. But in doing so they ran a risk, emphasised by Rabbath
when he wrote in a Beirut newspaper that such guarantees ‘will be more useful
to the Powers than to the minorities. The latter will find their real guarantee
not on paper but in the creation of an atmosphere of reciprocal comprehen-
sion and sympathy.’ 81 Rabbath’s vision of the citizen’s full participation in

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 151

state institutions, as we have seen, included the constitutional guarantee that
a Christian could become president of the republic like any other Syrian. The
structured and permanent political separation of Christians from other Syrians
sought by minoritarianist Christian clergymen would hardly have permitted
such a thing.

It is important to understand that this debate was not mere sectarian or
ethnic bickering. Modern states, which claim to represent their populations,
must somehow decide how the population is to be represented; likewise they
must decide on what grounds the population is to be incorporated into the
much expanded structures of the nation-state. These questions give rise to per-
manent contestation - which is not the same as saying that they make conflict
inevitable. What we see in the debate over minorities clauses in the Franco-
Syrian treaty is political figures who identified themselves with various groups
advancing answers to that question in line with their own political interests
and the interests of those groups as they defined them. (The ‘majority’ was
one of those groups.) The questions are so contested because Syrian independ-
ence was only a prospect, raised by the treaty negotiations but not yet fully
achieved, nor fully defined. The institutional relationship of population and
state in post-mandate Syria therefore also remained to be defined.

Finally, the debate over minority guarantees also reveals struggles over
leadership, legitimate authority, and representation within the communities
being (re)defined as ‘minorities’. When certain Circassian notables demanded
guaranteed seats in the Syrian parliament for ‘two Tcherkess members pro-
posed by the Tcherkesses ’, 82 for example, what did they mean by ‘proposed
by the Tcherkesses’? Or rather, who did they mean? One can assume that pro-
nationalist Circassians put forward in elections by the National Bloc would
not count - that if the community were redefined in this way only minori-
tarianist Circassians like these notables would be electable to the ‘Circassian’
seats. But these notables did not represent the only current of opinion among
Syria’s Circassians: during the 1936 treaty negotiations, for example, 150
Circassians from Manbij - one of the largest Circassian settlements in northern
Syria, about fifty miles east of Aleppo - drove to the city to display their adhe-
sion to the nationalist cause. One of their vehicles carried a banner with the
slogan ‘The struggle for the Fatherland, and obedience to the Bloc ’. 83

This issue is explicitly present in the letter that the six Catholic bishops
wrote to Martel. When they stated that ‘minorities are not represented’ in
the nationalist delegation in Paris, this was not on the grounds that national-
ists were Muslims and minorities were Christians, but because ‘the members
composing it, Christians included, [were] linked by engagements, the first
towards the Nationalist Bloc to which he belongs, and the second towards the
government of which he is a part ’. 84 The two Christians mentioned are Faris
al-Khoury and Edmond Homsi, respectively. The implication is that a nation-
alist Christian like al-Khoury could represent nationalists but not Christians.

152 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Homsi, meanwhile, was not even a member of the Bloc: they disqualify him
simply because he was a minister in the existing caretaker government. So who
could legitimately represent Christians? The answer is categorical: ‘It is only
fair [de toute justice ] that these minorities should be represented within the
delegation by independent persons duly authorized by the supreme heads of
the communities . .

At issue, then, is not only the place of ‘minorities’ in an independent Syria,
but also the source of legitimate authority within the Christian communities
of Syria. These Catholic archbishops saw themselves as the source of that
authority: no-one might represent their communities without their blessing.
(We have already seen that they started their letter by calling themselves the
‘representatives’ of Christian communities.) They were seeking to constitute
Syria’s Christians as legally-defined ‘minorities’, within which authority would
reside with the church leaders. As I noted in Chapter 2, this was a vision -
rooted in the Ottoman millet past - that the French were generally keen to
accommodate, but it posed greater problems in the context of a (secular)
nation-state form than in a religiously-legitimated empire. Many Christians,
particularly younger ones, were comfortable with and supportive of Syrian
nationalism. But even a nationalist might envisage a political role for the patri-
archs. Edmond Rabbath, outlining the guarantees that a treaty might propose
for minorities, suggested that these guarantees be placed under the jurisdiction
of the Teague of Nations and the International Court in the Hague. ‘The right
to petition these bodies would be recognized to the Patriarchs - and to them
alone - each for his own community.’ 85

Conclusion

In the inter-war years, as Syria went from being part of the Ottoman Empire
to being a separate nation-state, the institutional relationship between popula-
tion and state was substantially re-formed. ‘Nationalising’ reforms in the late
Ottoman period had begun this process, but the elaboration of nation-state
institutions - and the scale and intensity of their impact on population and
territory - now changed up a gear. The institutional form and legitimacy of the
state were put on quite new bases, not only internally but also externally. The
Ottoman Empire was a dynastic empire whose existence required no external
institutional sanction other than God’s. Syria under the mandate was a nation-
state-in-waiting, provisionally recognised as such by the League of Nations; to
become a fully independent state it would also require the external sanction of
international law.

For newly independent states that sanction depended partly on the legal
protection they gave to ‘minorities’ within their populations. The question of
minorities was a point of articulation between the external institutional form
of the state (a nation-state recognised by other nation-states) and its internal

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [153

structure (how the state related to its population). The importance of this
question was only heightened by the fact that Syria was passing to independ-
ence from the position of being a mandate under French imperial control: an
external power was present on the ground, and already had well-established
links with groups within the population - and reasons to support their claims
to minority status. Within the debate about a Franco-Syrian treaty, the
legally-defined category of minority became a vehicle for the political claims
of competing groups and individuals within Syrian society. Different political
actors could advance their particular claims by harnessing them to the concept.
Syrians could use it, for example, to demand special support from the imperial
power (because France, faced with the necessity of a treaty, had adopted the
language of minorities to justify its own political claims in Syria), and to attract
attention and perhaps political support from other international actors (since
the international community and notably the League now expressly concerned
themselves with protecting minorities, as defined in international law).

At the same time, the concept also became the terrain on which their com-
petition played out. The debate over how minorities were to be defined and
what distinct legal status was to be granted to them, if any - in other words,
the debate about what the term meant - was itself an arena in which differ-
ent groups and individuals could advance their political claims. This was part
of the contest over the institutional form of the population’s relationship to
the state, including the degree of control over it exerted by groups within the
population: a contest which naturally involved the majority just as deeply as it
did minorities. Within that wider contest, the debate over minority guarantees
also reveals struggles over leadership, legitimate authority and representation
in the communities being (re)defined as minorities. It would be a serious over-
simplification to assume that the debate over minorities was about no more
than how to balance correctly the interests of discrete groups - a majority and
some minorities - whose own internal coherence and structure was already
defined. The suggestions made by participants in the debate as to how minori-
ties should be defined and protected were intended to shape the groups they
claimed to represent. The debate itself was one means by which the work of
redefinition was carried out.

Writers claiming to speak for particular communities rarely raised the ques-
tion of how their communities were to be defined: instead, rather like national-
ists, they took it for granted that these groups existed and that their members
both know who they were and accepted the speaker’s right to speak for them.
But, just as nationalist claims about a ‘nation’ should be understood less as
evidence for the existence of that nation than as an attempt to persuade such
an entity into being, so the claims of a minoritarianist should not be taken as
simply reflecting the existence of a coherent and self-conscious ‘minority’ - still
less as reflecting the uniform political opinion of such a group. If successful,
though, those claims would enshrine the existence of the minority in state

154 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

structures, just as nationalist claims would enshrine the existence of the nation.
This is what the minoritarianists discussed here hoped to achieve, as should
be clear. Granting a distinct legal status to minorities would not just attach
neutral legal categories to existing defined communities; it would in itself
redefine those communities as political and social entities, both in relation to
the state and internally (by fixing structures of political and judicial authority
within each of them).

It is easy to see how the treaty diplomacy of the 1930s - itself influenced by
a constellation of other factors - defined the territory of the Syrian state: the
Alaouites, the Jabal Druze and the Jazira were included; most of the Sanjak of
Alexandretta was in the end excluded. Along with the internal development of
the state apparatus, treaty diplomacy was part of the process that defined this
territory as Syria (or not). It would take an anachronistic, nationalist view of
the state to argue that the Jazira simply was a part of ‘Syria’, or Alexandretta
a part of ‘Turkey’, prior to this period. Because the results cannot be traced on
a map, though, it is a little harder to see the ways in which treaty diplomacy
and the debate about it also shaped both the Syrian ‘nation’ and the commu-
nities redefined as ‘minorities’ within the Syrian nation-state. But shape them
it surely did. And just as the effect of the treaty diplomacy on territory went
beyond mere geographical definition, diffusing a notion of the national ter-
ritory in the minds of Syrians, so the debate about minorities clauses shaped
‘minorities’ - and the ‘majority’ - in ways that went beyond the mere definition
of legal status.

Notes

1. D-SL Box 493, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien. Minorites. Sous-dossiers. Nouri to
HC (7/8/1936).

2. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under sixty-year rule), sub-
dossier Les Knrdes en Syrie - Informations. Unnumbered Information ‘a/s Latif
Ghanime et la question des minorites’ (17/10/1932).

3. AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, petition from Circassians in Qunaytra, Homs,
Hama, and Marj Sultan to High Commission for forwarding to League of Nations
(1/4/1933).

4. Roger Owen kindly provided this information in an unpublished paper (see
Bibliography). See also Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations
in Interwar Europe’, Daedalus (1997), 126(2): 47-63, and No Enchanted Palace:
The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 108; and Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the
League of Nations’, review essay, The American Historical Review (2007), 112(4)
online, paras 16-21.

5. References to the Charter come from Nadine Meouchy (ed.), France, Syrie et
Liban 1918-1946. Les ambiguites et les dynamiques de la relation mandataire

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [155

(Damascus: Institut frangais d’etudes arabes de Damas, 2002), Annexe. The
English text is available in Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, Appendix A, No. 1.

6. The closest to such a thing in Syria was the Turcophone community in the Sanjak
of Alexandretta, which after the 1921 Ankara agreement had specific guaranteed
rights. These included official language status within the sanjak for Turkish,
which - Article 8 notwithstanding - no other ‘minority’ language in Syria had.
Unlike the rights assigned to unspecified ‘communities’ in the mandate charter,
Alexandretta Turks’ rights were not guaranteed by the mandatory’s obligation to
the League - which had no real autonomous power of its own - but by a bilateral
treaty with a neighbouring state, which did have autonomous power that could
be brought to bear to ensure those rights were respected. It is no coincidence that
the Alexandretta Turks were the only ‘minority’ community whose existence led
to a major alteration in the shape of the Syrian nation-state constituted by the
mandate.

7. See, e.g., David Commins, Historical Dictionary of Syria (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 1996): ‘Franco-Syrian Treaty of 1936’; Khoury, Syria and the French
Mandate, pp. 464-8, 479, and chs 18 and 20; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, ch. 6
s. 2, ch. 7; Peter Shambrook, French Imperialism in Syria, 1927-1936 (Reading:
Ithaca Press, 1998), pp. 205-28.

8. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, p. 203.

9. Shambrook, French Imperialism in Syria, pp. 247-8; Khoury, Syria and the French
Mandate, p. 467.

10. Briand was both foreign minister and president du conseil (prime minister) at
the time. AD-SL Box 412, dossier containing material on the question of Syrian
unity/the Syrian federation. Extract from Note N° 138, HC to Briand (27/3/1921)
included in document (dated only 1924) from the Service des Renseignements,
service central, section d’etudes.

11. The Comite de l’Afrique frangaise was founded in 1890, the Comite de l’Asie
framjaise in 1901. The Comite du Maroc followed in 1904, and the Comite France-
Amerique in 1910. They shared one address and formed ‘a single colonial-imperial
pressure group’ (L. Abrams and D. J. Miller, ‘Who were the French colonialists?
A reassessment of the parti colonial, 1890-1914’, The Historical journal (1976),
19(3): 685-725, quote at 687).

12. Abrams and Miller, ‘Who were the French colonialists?’, p. 687. This article con-
tains much useful background information on the colonialist committees and their
place in the wider milieu of French politics.

13. An idea of his activities can be gained from his author details in the catalogue of
the Bibliotheque nationale de France, and the ninety-nine items listed (albeit with
much repetition) under his name there.

14. For more on de Caix see Gerard Khoury, Une tutelle coloniale.

15. Such as ‘L’Opinion framjaise et les interets nationaux dans le Levant’, L’Asie fran-
faise (henceforward AF) 162 (Apr.-Jul. 1915), pp. 42-5. NB: please see note in
Bibliography on authorship of articles in the bulletin.

156 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

16. ‘La politique turque de suppression des allogenes’, AF 162 (Apr.-Jul. 1915),
pp. 57-60.

17. ‘L’extermination des Nestoriens’, AF 167 (Oct.-Dec. 1916), p. 174.

18. The word is slightly less obscure in French than in English, and has a slightly differ-
ent meaning. The OED, under the variant spelling allogeneous, gives ‘Of different
nature, diverse in kind’; for allogene, the Tresor de la langue franfaise first gives
it as an anthropological term (‘Said of an ethnic group installed since a relatively
short time ago on a territory’ - hardly the case here - ‘and still presenting racial or
ethnic characteristics distinguishing it from the autochthonous population’) then in
other senses as non-native.

19. ‘La question de Syrie et la paix’, AF 174 (Oct. 1918-Jan. 1919), pp. 121-9, quote
at 121. The phrase jeu loyal implies ‘playing-out according to the set rules’.

20. Once again I am glossing over the complexities of Greek identity as ‘national’ iden-
tity, such as the fact that many Anatolian ‘Greeks’ spoke Turkish as their language
of ordinary use. Needless to say, similar complexities apply to other ‘national’
identities also.

21. ‘La question de Syrie et la paix’, AF 174 (Oct. 1918-Jan. 1919), pp. 121-9, quote
at 121.

22. As above, quote at 122.

23. As above, quote at 129. Emphasis added, to render an emphatic tone in the
original.

24. This and following quotes from Henri Froidevaux, ‘Les difficulties de la France en
Syrie - leurs causes’, AF 179 (Feb. 1920), pp. 43-7; quotes at 43. For the bulletin,
if not in reality, the ‘religious factor’ if anything gained in importance at the end of
1924, when Aleppo and Damascus were reunited in one state of Syria: from then on,
only religious divisions affected the territorial division of the mandate territories, so
highlighting the regional rivalry between the two main cities became redundant.

25. ‘Ce que les Syriens attendent de la France’, AF 178 (Jan. 1920), pp. 13-16, quote
at 16.

26. ‘Le programme politique declare par le Haut Commissaire en Syrie et au Liban’,
AF 253 (Sep.-Oct. 1927), pp. 283-9, quote at 287.

27. ‘Nationalites et Nationalisme arabe dans le Proche Orient’, signed F.T. AF 111
(Feb. 1930), pp. 52-65, quote at 56.

28. I ended my survey in 1939 because the outbreak of the Second World War marks
the end of the period covered in this book. The bulletin ceased publication in May
1940, for obvious reasons.

29. This does not mean that it is ever examined or defined by those who use it,
however.

30. Shambrook, French Imperialism in Syria, p. 247.

31. Both in France and among the personnel of the High Commission there were many
who did not even grudgingly accept this necessity, and sought to torpedo any plan
for Syrian independence: ‘To the missionaries, Jesuits, and military caste the Treaty
was anathema.’ (Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. 224.)

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 157

32. Shambrook, French Imperialism in Syria, p. 248.

33. 1933 also saw the worst drought in Syria since the First World War, if not in living
memory, with a sharp rise in famine proportionate to a steep decline in wheat pro-
duction. Major social consequences included banditry in the countryside, an influx
of peasants to the cities and the temporary emigration of as many as 30,000 people
from the hardest hit region, the Hawran. (Philip S. Khoury, ‘The paradoxical in
Arab nationalism. Interwar Syria revisited’, in Jankowski and Gershoni (eds),
Rethinking Arab Nationalism, pp. 273-87 at p. 278.) If it seems odd to relegate
this catastrophic social backdrop to a footnote, it is because it is nowhere men-
tioned in any of the Syrian or French sources I have read on the minorities ques-
tion. Nor do French sources on the treaty negotiations of 1933 and 1936 refer to
the effects of the great depression in France. These telling lacunae should be borne
in mind.

34. ‘Le programme politique declare par le ITaut Commissaire en Syrie et au Liban,
AF 253 (Sep.-Oct. 1927), pp. 283-9, quote at 288.

35. ‘***’, ‘La situation actuelle des Tcherkesses en Syrie’, AF 308 (Mar. 1933), pp.
94-5. This quote is from an editor’s note at the head of the article.

36. As above, quote at 94. Note the common confusion between religious and ethno-
linguistic factors: if the Circassians were demanding communal recognition as a
minority it was by distinction from an Arab, not Muslim, ‘majority’.

37. See Chapter 2.

38. ‘***’, ‘La situation actuelle des Tcherkesses en Syrie’, AF 308 (Mar. 1933),
pp. 94-5, quote at 94.

39. ‘Le sort des minorites nationales en Irak’, AF 311 (Jun. 1933), p. 210. L’Asie fran-
gaise later reproduced these ‘wise recommendations’ from the Commission’s 1931
report: AF 313 (Sep.-Oct. 1933), pp. 268-71.

40. ‘Le sort des minorites nationales en Irak’, AF 311 (Jun. 1933), p. 210.

41. See Husry, ‘The Assyrian Affair’; Zubaida, ‘Contested nations’.

42. ‘Les minorites nationales en Irak’, AF 312 (Jul.-Aug. 1933), p. 257. It is worth
noting here that prior to Iraqi independence, ‘national minorities’ had been rare
in L’Asie fran^aise’s coverage of Syria and the wider Arab world: more common
were arguments that the ‘nationality principle’ simply did not apply in the Arab
countries.

43. ‘Le traite franco-syrien’, AF 314 (Nov. 1933), p. 328.

44. ‘L’lrak et la question assyrienne’, AF 315 (Dec. 1933), pp. 338-48, quote at 338.

45. E.g., on Iraq, ‘La question des Assyro-Chaldeens’, AF 327 (Feb. 1935), p. 27; ‘La
question chaldeo-assyrienne’, AF 328 (Mar. 1935), p. 97; on Syria see below.

46. This and following quotes from ‘Les Yezidis du Djebel Sindjar’, AF 334 (Nov.
1935), p. 307.

47. ‘Repression de la revoke des Yezidis’, AF 335 (Dec. 1935), p. 341, quoting La
Syrie, 27/11/1935.

48. ‘Une nouvelle crise syrienne’, AF 338 (Mar. 1936), pp. 74-8, quote at 78.

49. ‘A la suite de l’accord du l cr mars’, AF 339 (Apr. 1936), pp. 129-30, quote at 130.

i 5 8 ]

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

50. ‘La question des minorites’, AF 339 (Apr. 1936), p. 130.

51. In its own right and as a point of comparison, the situation of Iraq’s minorities
continued to get coverage: e.g., ‘Causes des revokes des minorites nationales en
Irak’, AF 340 (May 1936), pp. 163-4; ‘Le traite Franco-Syrien’, AF 344 (Nov.
1936), pp. 281-92.

52. E.g., three articles all entitled ‘Le traite franco-syrien sera-t-il modifie?’: AF 354
(Nov. 1937), p. 289; AF 355 (Dec. 1937), pp. 320-1; AF 356 (Jan. 1938), p. 31.

53. This is noticeable from the start of the 1936 negotiations: ‘La question des minor-
ites’, AF 339 (Apr. 1936), p. 130.

54. See, e.g., ‘Le traite franco-syrien et les minorites chretiennes de Syrie’, AF 359
(Mar. 1938), pp. 94-5.

55. I use this barbarous neologism to distinguish a person seeking to enframe and
mobilise a political constituency as a minority (a ‘minoritarianist’) from a member
of a minority (a minoritarian). French officials in Syria used minoritaire in the
latter sense, though usually when talking about people who might be described as
the former.

56. The Arabic phrase, containing a grammatical error, is ‘ ma’a ba c d al-bunud
wal-rawdbit lil-mubcifadhat al-aqalliyyat ayy al-masihiyyin wal-yahiid’. AD-SL
Box 493, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien. Minorites. Sous-dossiers. Nouri to F1C
(7/8/193 6). A French translation is included.

57. This and following quotes from AD-SL Box 493, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien.
Minorites. Sous-dossiers. Letter from six Catholic archbishops to HC, 18/3/1936,
forwarded under covering letter from Meyrier to MAE, 27/3/1936. (It is not clear
whether this is a translation or if the original document was in French.)

58. This insistence on religion alone is interesting, in a letter from leaders of Catholic
denominations using Greek, Syriac and Armenian as their church languages (some
of them - especially the Armenians - likely using languages other than Arabic at
home).

59. This and the following quote from AD-SL Box 620, dossier Mouvement minori-
taire Chretien, subdossier La question des minorites en Syrie et en Irak (Generalites
- correspondances, informations). Information N° 103 (21/12/1932). Giannini
might be considered both an internal and external actor in Syrian politics: the rep-
resentative of the Holy See, he could also claim with some authority to speak on
behalf of the Catholic churches of Syria and Lebanon.

60. This and following quotes from AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material
released under sixty-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie - Informations.
Unnumbered Information ‘a/s Latif Ghanime et la question des minorites’
(17/10/1932).

61. In his brief memoir ‘Syrie 1929, itineraire d’un officier’, in Anne-Marie Bianquis
(ed.), Damas. Miroir brise d’un Orient arabe (Paris: Autrement, 1993) pp. 95-104,
Pierre Rondot reproduces (p. 100) his diary entry of an encounter with Ghanime,
whose forceful personality was evidently quite marked.

62. This and following quote from AD-SL Box 620, dossier Mouvement minoritaire

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 159

Chretien, subdossier La question des minorites en Syrie et en Irak (Generalites -
correspondances - informations) . Information No 1203, 18/3/1933.

63. The petition described by the Surete gives the same demands as those received by
the High Commission, in the same order. It lists nine rather than ten demands
because two items regarding education are conflated.

64. AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, petition from Circassians in Qunaytra, Homs,
Hama and Marj Sultan to High Commission for forwarding to League of Nations
(1/4/1933). Although references to minorities, majorities and the treaty are clear in
both, checking the original Arabic against the French translation reveals small but
significant differences. The translation gives ‘the Circassian population of Syria’
for the original’s ‘the Syrian Circassian people [al-sha‘b al-sharkasi al-sun]’ - a
warmer assertion of Syrian identity?

65. The Kurds are discussed in Chapter 4. For the Isma'ilis, see, e.g., contents of
AD-SL Box 410, untitled dossier, subdossier Requete de la communaute Ismailieh
a/s sauvegardee [sic] de leurs droits. Most of these documents are in French trans-
lation only; the Arabic originals that are present use the term taifa to describe the
community, but do refer to ‘minority rights [huqiiq al-aqalliyydt]’ .

66. This and following quotes from AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material
released under sixty-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie - Informations.
Unnumbered Information ‘a/s Latif Ghanime et la question des minorites’ (Beirut,
17/10/1932).

67. This document being a French report on Ghanime’s views - though clearly one
based on discussions with him - the term ‘extremist’ may not be Ghanime’s own.

68. This explains the aberrant presence of this document in a box otherwise dedicated
to the Kurds, in which few documents call them a ‘minority’: Ghanime’s proposal,
although it mentions them only in passing, would recast them as such.

69. AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, petition from Circassians in Qunaytra, Homs,
Hama and Marj Sultan to High Commission (1/4/1933).

70. AD-SL Box 494, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien - Application - Question des
minorites. Petition from Circassian village chiefs and members of ‘councils of
elders’ addressed to HC via assistant delegate for muhafazas of Homs and Hama,
11/3/1936. A French translation is also enclosed.

71. Not, as far as I can tell, the same ones - though two Daghestanis head the list of
signatures, and the earlier mazbata was supposed to be ‘sponsored’ in Homs by
another. However, Daghestani is not a rare name among Circassians in Syria,
many of whose families originated in Daghestan.

72. This and following quotes from AD-SL Box 494, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien
- Application - Question des minorites. Statement to the League of Nations by
Khaled Daghestani et al., Homs, March 1938, included with letter to assistant
delegate for Homs and Hama muhafazas. French translation (original not present)
forwarded by HC to MAE (22/3/1938).

73. ‘Le programme politique declare par le Haut Commissaire en Syrie et au Liban’,
AF 253 (Sep.-Oct. 1927), pp. 283-9, quotes at 287.

160 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

74. I do not know if his study became the Bloc’s official policy, but it was at least
carried out ‘at the demand of Djemil Mardam Bey and with [Ibrahim] Hanano’s
knowledge’. My knowledge of it is from a High Commission document evidently
drawn up after an interview with Rabbath himself: AD-SL Box 620, dossier
Mouvement minoritaire Chretien , subdossier La question des minorites en Syrie
et en Irak (Generalites - correspondances, informations ). Information N° 101
(21/12/1932).

75. AD-SL Box 620, dossier Mouvement minoritaire Chretien, subdossier La question
des minorites en Syrie et en Irak (Generalites - correspondances, informations) .
Information N° 101 (21/12/1932).

76. I have already pointed out in Chapter 3 that individuals could also use regionalism
as a means of demanding - and getting - guaranteed access to state jobs.

77. This was not ‘because’ of those linguistic rights themselves, but because of the use
to which nationalist Turks had successfully put them. The nationalist assump-
tion that this was a natural expression of Turkish national feeling, whether stated
overtly in nationalist historiography or implicitly reproduced by historians who
do not question the categories of nationalism, elides the actual history of the
process - notably the generational change in the 1930s - as well as the alternative
outcomes that not only could have existed but did exist. Many ‘Turks’ in northern
Syria became ‘Arabs’. Subhi Bey Barakat, with his poor Arabic and strong Turkish
accent, might not have been an Arab nationalist, but he seems to have been content
to remain a Syrian politician, and not to become a Turkish one. Sati' al-Husri, one
of the most influential ideologues of Arab nationalism, also spoke Arabic with a
Turkish accent.

78. AD-SL Box 620, dossier Mouvement minoritaire Chretien, subdossier La question
des minorites en Syrie et en Irak ( Generalites - correspondances, informations) .
Information N° 101 (21/12/1932). These words are presented as direct quotes
from Rabbath.

79. AD-SL Box 493, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien. Minorites. Sous-dossiers. Letter
from six Catholic archbishops to HC (18/3/1936), forwarded under covering letter
from Meyrier to MAE (27/3/1936).

80. See following note.

81. AD-SL Box 494, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien - Application - Question des
minorites. Press clippings from Le Jour (Beirut): series of articles by Rabbath enti-
tled ‘Les problemes du Traite Franco-Syrien: Les minorites’, 6-10/3/1936.

82. As cited above.

83. AD-SL Box 568, untitled dossier (material declassified 1998), Information No
2092 (15/6/1936). Such a display of loyalty should not, of course, be taken simply
at face value.

84. This and following from AD-SL Box 493, dossier Traite Franco-Syrien. Minorites.
Sous-dossiers. Letter from six Catholic archbishops to HC (18/3/1936), forwarded
under covering letter from Meyrier to MAE (27/3/1936). As noted above, it is not
clear whether this is a copy of a French original or a translation from Arabic - the

The Franco-Syrian Treaty and the Definition of ‘Minorities’ [ 161

latter might explain the odd grammar of the sentence. NB: al-Kutla al-Wataniyya
can be translated as both National and Nationalist Bloc. I have used the former;
this source uses the latter.

85. AD-SL Box 620, dossier Mouvement minoritaire Chretien, subdossier La question
des minorites en Syrie et en Irak (Generalites - correspondences, informations) .
Information N° 101 (21/12/1932).

CHAPTER

6

PERSONAL STATUS LAW RELORM

Introduction

In February 1939, a French attempt to reform personal status law in Syria
provided an opportunity for Jamil Mardam Bek’s discredited National Bloc
government to leave office honourably after a succession of failures. A Fligh
Commissioner’s decree on the issue dated back to March 1936, but had not
been enacted. When a new decree, modifying but also resurrecting the origi-
nal, was promulgated in November 1938, it provoked widespread opposition
because it ‘treated the Moslems as one sect among many, and thus struck at
the root of the traditional Moslem conception of the State’. 1 As opposition
grew over the next months, the Mardam Bek government was able to make the
issue a point of honour: instructing the Syrian courts not to apply the new law;
asserting the Syrian parliament’s authority as sole legitimate source of legisla-
tion in Syria, and thereby denying the authority of the High Commission; and,
when ordered to back down, resigning instead. This allowed Mardam Bek to
regain some of the political legitimacy lost during the Bloc’s years in govern-
ment because of its failure - to name only the gravest issues - to get the treaty
ratified by France, to prevent the gradual loss of the Sanjak of Alexandretta,
and to impose its own authority on the newly incorporated regions of the Jabal
Druze, the Alaouites and the Jazira. With little left to lose, Mardam Bek used
the personal status reform issue to regain some of his political standing and
resigned ‘on a large wave of public enthusiasm’. 2

This, roughly, is the account of personal status law reform given in exist-
ing political histories of the mandate. The issue is mentioned briefly insofar as
it affects the historian’s account of nationalist politics, but it is not discussed
in or for itself. 3 Two studies omit to mention that having precipitated the fall
of the Mardam government and its short-lived successor over the issue, the

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 163

French were eventually forced to suspend both reform decrees - at least for
‘Muslims’. 4 Another does mention this suspension, but not its implications. 5
The relative lack of interest in the question of personal status law reform may
be understandable in the context of political and diplomatic histories. But
the issue deserves more attention than it has been given: its implications are
far-reaching and profound. 6

This chapter gives a detailed account of French attempts to enact legal reform
in this area, their failure, and what the controversy reveals about much larger
issues of state transformation. The first part explains the function of personal
status law in general terms, showing how it raised questions going far beyond
the merely personal. The rest of the chapter approaches the issue from three
different angles. First, it outlines French attempts to reform personal status
law in Syria during the mandate - attempts which failed in the mid- 1920s and
the later 1930s, in each case leading the High Commission to decide (for the
time being) that the question should be left to the legislation of local govern-
ments. It also identifies the moment at which the question of personal status
began to be understood as part of the question of minorities. Next, it turns
to the Syrian communities affected by the reform, whether because they were
defined as ‘personal status communities’ or because they were not, and places
those effects in the wider context of the development the nation-state. Rather
than involving ‘minorities’ from the outset, this was one of the areas where the
changing nature of the state (and of its relationship with the population) made
the concept of minority meaningful. Finally, the chapter considers opposition
to the reform among Sunni Muslim ‘ulama’, and shows how minority’s paired
concept, majority, fitted into that opposition. The controversy illustrates
the process by which both of these categories became meaningful, but at the
same time it highlights the dangers of taking them as objective categories for
analysis.

Questions of Personal Status

The mandatory authorities had inherited from the Ottoman Empire what they
considered to be a confusing mixture of legal jurisdictions, despite the consid-
erable reforms of the late Ottoman era (reforms for which French writers gave
the Ottomans little credit). 7 The first confusion was the unclear distinction
between the jurisdiction of common law - derived from Islamic legal principles
but exercised by civil courts - and the jurisdiction of the shariah courts, which
had the force of state law in matters of personal status. The second confusion
arose from the state’s official recognition of multiple non-Muslim communi-
ties: these had their own communal authorities which, for their own members,
also had jurisdiction in personal status matters. 8

The relationship between these different jurisdictions was not clear.

164 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Religious authorities responsible for personal status carried out all sorts of
acts relevant to civil law, such as recording births on the civil register. When
personal status cases involved members of different communities there was
competition - sometimes bitter - over which legal authority was competent
to try them. Christian leaders felt that they were at a permanent disadvantage
to Muslims in this respect, since the general rule was that if a Muslim was
involved then the case was heard by the shariah courts, while cases tried under
common law were de facto under Muslim law. Even more galling to non-
Muslim religious authorities was when members of their own communities
preferred to use the shariah or civil courts in matters the communal authorities
were competent to try. Frequently, it was not so much that non-Sunni com-
munal authorities wanted to assert their own jurisdiction in order to apply dif-
ferent laws and reach different verdicts than the shariah or civil courts, as that
they wanted the right to reach the same verdicts for themselves. 9 1 say ‘commu-
nal authorities’ rather than ‘communities’ because there is no reason to assume
that lay Jews or Christians, for example, shared the enthusiasm of bishops and
rabbis for new legislation that would increase the religious authorities’ power
over ordinary members of each community. At one point in the reform debate,
for example, a French official noted that while rabbis were keen to expand
the authority of rabbinical courts over the Jewish community and limit as far
as possible the range of cases that Jews could bring under other jurisdictions
(shariah or civil courts), ordinary Jews were no more keen on being subjected
to rabbinical jurisdiction than to the jurisdiction of the shariah courts. General
feeling in this community favoured a ‘maximal’ civil law. 10

Fegal recognition from the state as a personal status community, mean-
while, was not uniform; some had greater privileges than others. Another issue
was that the Ottoman state had not recognised divisions within Islam, so what
the French called dissident and heretical Muslim communities had no com-
munal autonomy in the matter of personal status - at least, not in theory. In
practice, one such community, the Druzes, did (exceptionally) have a degree
of official recognition in the form of Ottoman berats and firmans, while unof-
ficial recognition was extended to communities such as ‘Alawis, Isma'ilis, and
Yazidis. 11

Underlying these many confusions was a greater one: what exactly was per-
sonal? Ostensibly, personal status law is just that: law governing the personal
status of the individual - marriage and divorce, testament and inheritance,
guardianship, religious belonging. In recognised personal status communities
(in French, communautes a statut personnel ), the community’s own religious
authorities had jurisdiction over their own members in these matters. Certain
specified legal powers - not necessarily the same ones in each case - thereby
devolved from the state to the communal authorities: a marriage celebrated
by a Greek Orthodox priest would be recognised by the state as legitimate; a
child’s birth to Jewish parents could be recorded on the civil register by a rabbi.

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 165

And where communal law differed from shariah law or civil law, it could
be applied to members of the community with the force of state law. Thus,
one effect of the official recognition granted to the Druzes was that a Druze
couple could bequeath most of their estate to one son rather than distributing
it among all their inheritors in the proportion that common law, following the
shariah, defined - though, as we shall see, the lucky son’s sisters might contest
the will, and the principle.

Personal status communities were differentiated from other communities
which, despite distinct religious beliefs, were not recognised as having their
own personal status. Where communities of the latter sort had a sufficiently
coherent communal existence, the French referred to them as common-law
communities ( communautes de droit commun ), but they lacked the privileges
of personal status communities: this applied mostly to Muslim communities
other than Sunnis, but not exclusively to them. Among Christian communities
during the mandate era, Protestants at one point found themselves reduced
(as they argued) to this status; it also applied to a schismatic church founded
by the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Latakia, Epiphanios, over a disciplinary
dispute with the Patriarch. 12 1 will discuss the disadvantages faced by common
law communities relative to personal status communities in more detail below;
to understand the difference between them it might be useful to consider the
advantages accorded by states to official marriages (whether civil or religious)
in comparison with the status of common law unions. Sunni Muslims, mean-
while, were not constituted as a personal status community because Syrian
common law was based on Sunni interpretations of the shariah: Sunnis did
not need a distinct personal status regime. This situation was viewed as
increasingly anomalous by the High Commission, however:

the Muslim community in general complains of having lost, since the occupation,
and without compensation, the major part of its privileges. Above all it complains
of being subjected to a regime of exception, which places it in a state of manifest
inferiority vis-a-vis the other communities . 13

The High Commission took the view that ‘the laicisation of the States, and the
transformation of the principle of sovereignty’, had left the Muslim community
- alone among Syria’s religious communities - without a legal personality or
‘proper organization’.

Because personal status was governed by religious law, the religion to which
the individual belonged was also considered a matter for personal status law:
conversion was one of the most controversial aspects of the topic. Personal
status law also covered the possessions of the personal status communities -
not the private possessions of their members (whose sale and purchase, if not
inheritance, would be regulated by common law), but the possessions of the
religious community itself. In the case of a Christian Church this might include

1 66 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

church buildings and cemeteries, but also communal schools or other real
estate, not to mention their contents. 14 In this and other areas, personal status
usually also defined certain privileges for members of those hierarchies: patri-
archs might not pay customs duties on luxuries imported for church use, for
example; but also, senior clerics might have the right not to appear in court in
person. 15 This was an important and controversial point of variance between
the different personal status communities, since the privileges accorded to
each by precedent differed - one of the many areas where the French hoped
to bring a new uniformity to the law. Lastly, personal status law was also
meant to decide where any legal disputes involving such matters would be
heard: another important point, especially when the dispute involved members
of more than one community, since it effectively placed the jurisdictions in a
hierarchy.

Two things should be apparent from this brief discussion. First, the area of per-
sonal status law constituted a virtually unbounded field for legal (and political)
argument, especially as the limits of the ‘personal’ were - like any such legal
constructs - debatable. If such substantial concerns as education or (much
of) property law were placed under the purview of personal status law, and
therefore of the communal authorities, the state would be little more than the
guarantor of those authorities: its own direct interaction with the population
would be much reduced. One French official felt that a draft communal statute
for the Catholic communities, presented by the Apostolic Delegate in Syria and
Lebanon, set the bounds of Catholic personal status so far to the advantage
of the Church, and correspondingly to the disadvantage of the state, that the
latter would be transformed - at least, where Syria’s Catholics were concerned
- into the ‘secular arm [bras seculierY of the Church. 16 This leads on to the
second point: that in Syria, personal status law was an important structuring
element of the institutional relationship between population and state. French
attempts to reform the law wholesale therefore implied major changes to that
relationship.

French Attempts to Reform Personal Status Law: Aims, Stakes, Results

On 1 April 1939, the Fligh Commissioner Gabriel Puaux wearily informed a
colleague in Iraq that the question of personal status law reform in Syria ‘[had]
been under study at the Fligh Commission for long years’. 17 The previous day
he had definitively abandoned the most recent attempt in the face of violent
unrest and governmental crisis in Damascus. This section gives a chronologi-
cal overview of French reform efforts, and examines French motivations in the
light of the broader development of the nation-state form in Syria. A detailed
discussion of what the question meant to Syrians is left to the following
sections.

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 1 67

Puaux’s predecessors had indeed been studying the question for years.
Requests for legal reform in this area had been coming from religious leaders
themselves ‘since the military occupation’. 18 The early High Commissioners
took the view that:

One of the missions anticipated by the mandate that has been confided to France
concerns the reorganisation of [the system of] justice . . .

The absence of unity in the administration of justice and the unfortunately rather
arbitrary character of that justice had already, long before the war, been the object
of complaints from all fractions of the population, Muslims as much as Christians . 19

That is, they considered it necessary to overcome the confusions and incon-
sistencies outlined above. This note pointed out that in Turkey, the distinc-
tion between shariah courts and civil courts had been overcome by the simple
abolition of the former: ‘one of the most striking acts of the Ottoman [sic]
Republic’. 20 The French in Syria, similarly, wanted to limit the jurisdiction
of the religious courts, especially the shariah courts. The High Commission’s
early studies of the question concluded that:

it was necessary to reduce the jurisdiction of the Cadi [al-qadT, the shariah court
judge] to just proportions - which is to say, to leave to him only certain matters
closely pertaining to religious law [tenant de tr'es pres an droit religieux], like mar-
riage, other matters that were formerly part of Personal Status being confided to the
jurisdiction of the common law courts . . . 21

Limiting the authority of the shariah courts, one of the most powerful
social institutions in Syria - a vast tree rooted in the Sunni Muslim population,
but either sheltering or (depending on one’s point of view) overshadowing the
whole of society - would have obvious political benefits for France, especially
as the civil courts would ‘also receive the guarantee of the presence of one
or two French magistrates’. But abolishing them completely, feasible for an
indigenous nationalist government in Turkey that had just fought a success-
ful war for independence (and whose secularising aims were not yet widely
understood), was much more problematic in mandate Syria, where France was
a foreign occupier viewed as illegitimate by much of the population.

The situation was also different in Turkey in that the near elimination of
the Christian population of Anatolia in the decade 1914-24 meant that the
existence of multiple personal status jurisdictions posed little practical obsta-
cle to a secularising nationalist government intent on imposing uniform state
authority. In Syria, by contrast, the Christian population remained propor-
tionately much larger, and its diverse communal authorities were determined
to maintain their legal privileges - partly, no doubt, because events in Anatolia
had convinced them more than ever of the need for solid legal defences against

168 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

the ‘Muslim’ state. Under French rule there was also more scope - and more
incentive - for Muslim but non-Sunni groups to mobilise as distinct political
communities. The French preference for standardisation and desacralisation
of the legal system was thus offset by a tacit understanding that maintaining
and, in some senses, extending the legal autonomy of religious communities
might be politically useful for France. First, it would at least partially satisfy
the lobbying of the church hierarchies - a key political client - which tended
towards the maximum possible extension of that autonomy (though different
patriarchs had different conceptions of what was possible). Second, it would
reinforce the authority of the church hierarchies relative to both the Syrian
state and the Christian population. Similar effects would be created in the
Muslim ‘dissident sects’, though here the margin for action was reduced by the
absence of legal precedents justifying communal autonomy.

Such were the concerns of the mandatory authorities in the early 1920s. But
although the question was studied, new legislation was slow to emerge. A Fligh
Commissioner’s decree was prepared under General Weygand, which

brought about jurisdictional equality by reducing the competence of the confes-
sional tribunals, including the Shariah tribunals, to cases relative to the matrimonial
statute while still leaving them a right of voluntary jurisdiction [droit de juridiction
gracieuse] in matters of succession and testament . 22

Since the shariah courts had a wider range of competence than other religious
jurisdictions, this measure would have involved a proportionally greater reduc-
tion of their authority. But the project ‘satisfied no-one [and] was rejected
unanimously by the representatives of the communities’; when Weygand was
replaced at the end of 1924 it was shelved. His successor, General Sarrail, revis-
ited the question but was also recalled before a decree could be promulgated.

The first actual legislation came in 1926, with the civilian High
Commissioner Henry de Jouvenel. He promulgated a decree - Decree 261/
LR of 28 April 1926, to come into effect on 1 June - giving the civil courts
competence over all personal status matters previously heard by communal
courts except a very limited range pertaining directly to marriage and divorce.
Since the civil court officials had pointed out the difficulty they would have
‘in applying laws and usages which were nowhere codified’ 23 in the matters
newly transferred to their jurisdiction, it was to be supplemented by the codi-
fication of the existing canon laws and the institution of a civil personal status
legislation, including a civil marriage regime. 24

However, this decree fell victim to the combination of local opposition and
the rapid turnover of High Commissioners in the early years of the mandate.
Everywhere outside the Alaouites the decree provoked such protests that the
High Commission decided to ‘leave to the States [that is, the local govern-
ments] the care of assessing whether the new legislation should be put into

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 169

effect immediately or, on the contrary, deferred’. 25 The political vocabulary of
a later era would describe this solution as a ‘fudge’. Jouvenel having returned
to France to seek election to the Senate, the decree was simply suspended
- initially until the end of October 1926, but then, it seems, indefinitely. A
document written in Paris in the middle of that month ringingly asserted that
‘no important reason can now prevent the reform from being executed’ and
argued that ‘this initiative indisputably falls to the High Commission’ - not the
local governments - since it affected all the states under French mandate. But
Jouvenel’s successor, Henri Ponsot, evidently took a different view. 26 During
Ponsot’s seven years in Beirut - as long as his four predecessors combined -
the High Commission continued to study the subject, but no further action
was taken. 27 ‘Having considered until 1926 that the accomplishment of this
reform was a mandate task [oeuvre de mandat]’, another official later wrote
of this period, ‘we seem to have decided since this time to leave to the States
the care of legislating in this matter.’ 28 It was not until after the arrival as
High Commissioner of Count Damien de Martel, in 1933, that the earlier line
reappeared.

Martel believed that ‘the settlement of this important question is a mandate
obligation’. 29

This reform having a general character must be applied to all the confessional minor-
ities, including the Shi'ites, the Druzes, the ‘Alawis and the Isma'ilis. Moreover, it
must permit every community to obtain its legal recognition, under conditions to
be determined, and every individual to withdraw from confessional law in matters
relative to his Personal Status.

Two points deserve to be drawn out here. First is the introduction into this
debate of the language of minorities, hitherto absent. Documents in the High
Commission archives on this subject dating from the later 1920s much prefer
the term ‘communities’. It was only in the 1930s that the term ‘minority’ was
also attached to existing or prospective personal status communities, both
by the French and by Syrians claiming to speak for those communities. This
emphasises the point made in the previous chapter, that it was only as the
prospect of a Franco-Syrian treaty and Syrian independence arose that the
term really took root in Syria. Indeed, in the debate on personal status law,
‘minority’ crops up most often in documents that address the vexed question
of whether that law should be the object of an externally guaranteed treaty
obligation. 30 But ‘community’ remained by far the preferred term in this
context, perhaps partly because the set expression ‘personal status commu-
nity’ was so well established. (I have nowhere encountered the term ‘personal
status minority’.) If it was hard for the French to discuss a treaty without
talking about minorities, the same was not true of personal status law. This
highlights the dangers of assuming that personal status law was a minority

170 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

issue, or that personal status communities can unproblematically be described
as minorities.

The second point to underline is the forthright restatement of a secularis-
ing intent. The legal competence of religious communities in personal status
matters was to be set out in any reform, but so too was the right of any
individual to have his (or her) personal status dealt with in the civil courts
rather than the personal status courts of the community to which he or she
‘belonged’. However useful the legal segregation of Syrians by religion might
have been to French imperialism, a more fundamental aim was to assert
the place of the state as the arbiter of religious authority, rather than reli-
gion as the arbiter of state authority - the state in question being the Syrian
state, not the mandatory authorities that oversaw it. 31 Although the High
Commissioner’s note concluded that a Turkish-style secularisation of the law
- outright abolition of religious courts, and the establishment of an exclusively
civil law of personal status - was impracticable in the mandate territories, it
set out a crucial principle for the ‘amelioration, consolidation and regulation
of the existing system’:

in the last instance, in the fixing of relations between the States and the Churches,
the supremacy of the civil powers must be admitted as a fundamental rule; in this
aim, any provisions of the communal laws liable to harm [that supremacy] must be
prohibited [on devra admettre comme regie fondamentale, la suprematie du pouvoir
civil et dans ce but, interdire toutes dispositions des reglements communaux de
nature a y porter atteinte ]. 32

Christian patriarchs would prove willing to accept this bargain as being less
disadvantageous to them than that offered by a ‘Muslim’ state, especially as
it would reinforce their own political authority. Muslim ‘ulama’, however,
would reject it.

This concern to establish state authority over religion echoes the Turkish
case, but is observable in modern states at large. Two examples might be
Tunisia or Italy. In Tunisia, under French protectorate, religious marriage had
been brought within the ambit of the state by granting religious ministers the
status of officers of the civil register - combining religious and civil functions
under state authority. Italy passed a law on the same subject in 1929: it did
not grant civil powers to religious ministers, but rather insisted that religious
marriages submit to state authority. Among its provisions were that ‘the nomi-
nation of ministers of religion must be submitted to the Ministry of Justice
for approval’, and that ministers officiating at a marriage must read Articles
130, 131 and 132 of the Italian civil code to the bride and groom and receive
their ‘express declaration . . . that they intend to take each other respectively
for husband and wife, observing the dispositions of article 95 of the civil
code’. These two examples are not chosen at random: the French Ministry of

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[ 171

Foreign Affairs, discussing Martel’s proposals for reform, cited them as pos-
sible examples for similar legislation in Syria. 33 For modern states the world
over, ‘husband and wife in the eyes of God’ is all very well, but God must duly
genuflect to the state. If French officials wanted to introduce legislation to this
effect in Syria it may have been less out of a specific desire to reduce Islam to
the status of ‘one sect among many’ than because this was simply how they felt
a modern state should act - which is not to say that any consequent reduction
of the institutional power of Muslim religious authorities would have been
unwelcome to them.

Tunisia and Italy were not the only countries to which the mandatory author-
ities turned to gather information on existing legislation and legal practice. They
sought information from the neighbouring states under British mandate, other
countries in the region, and further afield. I encountered references to more than
a dozen countries, from Palestine to the Dutch East Indies, Egypt to France, 34
not to mention the single most important reference point: the Ottoman Empire.
Such references could be brief, as in the claim that a draft reform had borrowed
from earlier legislation (much of it specified by title or name of drafter) in the
Ottoman Empire, Egypt, France, the Dutch East Indies, Algeria, ‘the Indies’
and Russian Turkestan. 35 Just as often, though, they were rather detailed. The
Controle des Wakfs reached the conclusion that outright secularisation would
not succeed in Syria and Lebanon after a comparison of reforms in Turkey,
Palestine, Iraq, Egypt and Persia. 36 In specific cases foreign legislation could
be cited at length (as with Italy, above), or the legal practice of other countries
studied in detail. French officials used the example of Palestine to decide how
Russian refugees in Syria - some stateless since the civil war, some still holding
Russian nationality - should fit into Syrian personal status law. 37 They also took
note of British practices relating to the election of Christian patriarchs. 38

With these concerns in mind the Eligh Commission under Martel patiently
prepared new legislation, discussed over months and years with local religious
authorities (especially the Christian patriarchs), the Syrian government, and
the ministry in Paris. Given the great care that the French took in drawing up
the reform legislation, it may seem surprising that it failed so completely.

Martel’s first decree on the subject was Decree 60/LR of 13 March 1936,
‘fixing the status of the religious communities’. 39 The timing was important:
the decree, in preparation for well over a year, was finally issued just after
France reluctantly agreed to negotiate a treaty with a nationalist delegation,
but before the delegation’s departure for Paris. This reflects a concern of the
High Commission that went back to Ponsot’s attempts to negotiate a treaty in
1933:

if the Syrian constitution clearly states the [comporte bien Vexpose des ] permanent

guarantees of public law conferred on individuals and communities, the status of the

172. ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

communities itself and the personal status of minoritarians belonging to the different
confessions is not defined by any organic text. These texts, of secondary interest for
as long as the mandate lasts, would become crucially important under the Treaty
regime. They must necessarily be drawn up before the Treaty comes into effect . 40

If the treaty were to include guarantees for minorities, the High Commission
felt, there had to be legislation in place for France to guarantee: considering
the communautes a statut personnel as minorities would allow personal status
law, once it was settled, to fill that role. Ponsot had believed that because of
‘the difficulty and complexity of the definitions to come [d intervenir] in these
matters’ it was unrealistic to make France’s signing a treaty conditional on
the establishment of such legislation: that is, he was guided by his sense that
personal status reform was, for political reasons, best left to the local govern-
ments. He therefore proposed that the treaty include an annexe obliging the
Syrian government to draw up and enact its own personal status legislation
in the four-year transitional period between the treaty’s signature and Syrian
independence. As we have seen, however, his successor Martel believed that
the reform was a task for the mandatory. He was motivated by the same
concern to get personal status legislation onto the statute books before a treaty
came into effect, but decided to do it by High Commissioner’s decree before
the treaty was even negotiated, let alone signed.

Decree 60/LR set out to fix the status of the religious communities, and the
choice of verb is important. 41 The decree certainly did, for what it is worth,
consider Sunni Muslims as one religious community among others. 42 But here
it is more important to note the ‘regularising’ intent of this decree, and its
assertion of the state’s authority over religion. By the terms of this decree, the
state sought to fix religious communities in several ways. First, in a regular
relationship to the state, as either personal status or common law communi-
ties, 43 all communities within each of these categories having the same status
vis-a-vis the state as the others. Second, the decree also fixed the internal struc-
ture of each recognised community: although each community was to produce
its own statute of personal status, also outlining communal organisation, the
state would approve it (Article 4). Once approved, it would have the force of
law for members of that community, falling ‘under the protection of the law
and the control of the public powers’ (Article 2): it could be changed only by
a legislative act of the state (Article 6). Communities could no longer evolve
according to their own internal dynamics, but must do so by reference to - and
permission of - the state. The same would go for individuals, who would be
permitted to change community but must declare this to the state (Article 11).

Authority within the communities was also established relative to (and by
devolution from) the state: the decree stipulated that communities and autono-
mous groupings within them would be represented by their religious leader
in financial and legal matters, for example (Article 8), and ‘in their relations

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i73

with the public powers by their highest religious leader’ (Article 9). Whereas
authority within the Ottoman millets had, owing to developments internal
to them, become increasingly secularised since the mid-nineteenth century or
earlier, 44 clerical authority was now reasserted from the outside, by the state.
Even common-law communities, with their much more limited rights and
privileges, would be subject to many of the same obligations towards the state:
a communal statute must be approved by government authority, and then it
too could be changed only by legislative act of the state (Article 16); the state
must be notified of the nomination of ministers of religion wishing to celebrate
marriage (Article 18); since the ministers of common-law communities were
not themselves empowered to record marriages officially, the marriages they
celebrated must be authorised and recorded by an ‘agent of the civil register’
(Articles 19-21). 45 And the status granted by the state, whether that of per-
sonal status community or common-law community, could also be revoked by
the state (Article 23). All in all, the text of this decree attempted a vast exten-
sion of the state’s formal authority over religion - and through it over whole
sectors of Syrian social life. This was especially the case because Sunni Islam
was treated as one such community, to be defined according to norms set by
the state, rather than as the true religion that set the norms that the state must
implement.

It was not only the opposition of Sunni Muslim clerics that made Decree 60
a dead letter when it was first promulgated, however. Religious figures from
other communities also found much to object to, and the Syrian government
privately warned the High Commission that it would be unable to put the
decree into effect. 46 There was also disagreement over how, exactly, each com-
munal statute was to be drawn up: who were the legitimate authorities, and
on what would they base their text? The High Commission received no less
than three competing draft statutes from different groups within the Lebanese
Druze community alone. 47 The archives suggest that the church hierarchies
maintained a monopoly over the drafting of statutes for the different Christian
communities, but it is safer to take this as evidence that the High Commission
accepted their authority than as proof that all Christians did.

These are some of the reasons why Decree 60 remained unimplemented.
When Martel invited the religious communities to comment on the text of
the decree, and set up a Franco-Syrian commission to study their remarks, 48
it seems to have been taken as a virtual abrogation by religious leaders. None
held back from suggesting revisions. One Christian clergyman’s comments
referred to the decree as a ‘draft [avant-projet]’, as though a decree already
promulgated by the High Commission were merely a planning document - a
salutary reminder that when the state sets out to impose its authority over
other institutions within society, they can offer effective resistance. 49

In the meantime, the political situation in Syria changed dramatically
with the signature of the treaty and the election of a nationalist government.

174 J T/;e Etnergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Between this and the succession of crises that quickly soured the elation of
late 1936, the question of personal status reform was eclipsed for a while. But
the commission continued its work, and in secret negotiations with the High
Commissioner in February 1938 the nationalist prime minister Jamil Mardam
Bek agreed to the text of a new decree; his justice minister ‘Abd al-Rahman al-
Kayyali also accepted its terms. 50 The decree was not issued until the following
November, however, after further guarantees had been extracted in Paris from
Mardam Bek - among them a promise to respect Christian personal status. 51
With the issuing of Decree 146/LR of 18 November 1938, ‘modifying and
completing decree N° 60/LR’, 52 we rejoin the political narrative of the end of
the National Bloc government.

The first four of Decree 146’s six articles each abrogated and replaced indi-
vidual articles of the earlier decree. These modifications introduced the pos-
sibility, for Syrian or Lebanese nationals, of not belonging to any recognised
community for personal status matters, in which case civil law would apply
(Article 1, revising Article 10 of Decree 60); ensured that in case of death or
separation ending a marriage the children would always follow the father’s
community, even if the mother had care of the children (Article 2, revising
Article 12); and stipulated that in case of collective secession from a com-
munity, the seceding group could take its property with it - except waqf
properties (‘biens dedies’) (Article 3, revising Article 13). Since these would
include much of a community’s immovable property, this small qualification
would make it considerably harder for any group secession to take place, thus
‘fixing’ the community even more. The new decree also abrogated the earlier
article granting a halfway status of Protestants in Lebanon (Article 4, revising
Article 22). Article 5, meanwhile, replaced - and expanded - the entire third
section of the original decree, with three articles of ‘general provisions [dispo-
sitions generates]’ being replaced by eight. 53 It included an article adding the
Protestant community of the mandate territories as a whole to the list of fully
recognised communities (new Article 28). It also removed the state’s right to
revoke a community’s recognition as a personal status community, as included
in the original Article 23 - the biggest single surrender of state authority in
the modifications.

The other revisions mostly applied to marriage and conversion; the most
important for our purposes are the new Articles 25 and 27. The former recog-
nised marriages contracted abroad by Syrian and Lebanese nationals, whether
with another Syrian or Lebanese national or with a foreigner, provided that
such a marriage followed the legal forms in the country where it took place. It
also stated that if those forms were contrary to the provisions of either spouse’s
personal status regime in the mandate territories, then the marriage would
there be considered subject to civil personal status law. This is significant,
as it raised the possibility of Syrians and Lebanese of different communities

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i75

escaping religious jurisdiction by going abroad to marry. As the ‘ulama’ would
forcefully observe, the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man
could thereby become legitimate under Syrian state law. The new Article 27,
meanwhile, set up a higher jurisdiction to rule in cases of conflict between per-
sonal status jurisdictions or between them and the civil courts. It would also
decide if the judgements of personal status jurisdictions passed over to the state
for execution had ‘been rendered competently and must be executed’; rule on
contraventions and infractions of personal status law; and give an authorita-
tive opinion on the interpretation and application of Decrees 60 and 146 to the
Syrian and Lebanese governments and to community leaders. Notwithstanding
a paragraph stipulating that in cases regarding conflict or competence, the
jurisdiction would include ‘alongside the President and members composing it’
a representative named by the head of each community concerned, this article
maintained the ultimate authority of the state over religious jurisdictions - as
the ‘ulama’ would also point out.

Signing Decree 146 was one of Martel’s last acts before retiring as High
Commissioner. He was replaced by Gabriel Puaux, who arrived in Syria at the
beginning of January 1939. According to Puaux, opposition to Decree 146 was
muted until February:

It was only at the beginning of that month that the Nationalist Bloc, desirous of cre-
ating difficulties for the mandatory power, and of setting its agitation on a religious
base in the Muslim world, provoked a petition from a group of Ulema . S4

The ‘petition’ in question was actually a letter, sent to the Syrian interior min-
istry by the president of the recently founded Damascus Association of ‘Ulama’
( Jam ‘iyyat al- ‘ ulama bi-Dimashq), Shaykh Kamil al-Qassab. Reserving judge-
ment for now on Puaux’s assessment of its origins, it is enough to note here
that the opposition triggered by this letter quickly spiralled beyond the French
capacity to control it - certainly beyond the capacity of the Syrian government
to control it. Hence Mardam Bek’s decision to ride the opposition instead,
making a stand against a legal text he had himself accepted. The Bloc govern-
ment responded to al-Qassab’s letter by instructing the courts not to apply the
revised decree since it was ‘not drawn up by the Syrian parliament, unique
source of legislation in the country’. 55

This qualification should be noted, for two reasons. First, it raised the
stakes by directly challenging French authority in the country; and second,
even if the Bloc was now running to keep up with the religious opposition,
by extension it nonetheless attempted to assert parliament’s authority over
the ‘ulama’. While this may have been an empty gesture at the time on both
counts, it is worth noting that the attempt to assert the civil state’s authority
over religion did not only come from the French: nationalist politicians could
try to do the same even while trying to capitalise on, and channel, religious

176 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

opposition to a French reform. On the same day - 13 February 1939 - the
Syrian Ministry of Justice set up a commission to study the reform decrees,
consisting of Mustafa Barmada and Yusuf al-Hakim (respectively president
and counsellor of the High Court of Cassation) and the acting Mufti-General
Shukri al-Ustuwani . 56

Contrary to Puaux’s claim that the Bloc had stirred up religious feeling to
its own ends, the Jam'iyyat al-‘ulama’ had issued its declaration not only in
opposition to the French for having issued the text, but to the Bloc for having
agreed to it. Ordering the courts not to apply the decree, and setting up a com-
mission to study it, allowed the Bloc to regain the political initiative. The meas-
ures temporarily succeeded in this aim - a delegation of Damascene nationalist
merchants came to thank Mardam Bek the next day, when the press published
the news 57 - but exacerbated the situation beyond the Bloc’s ability to control
it; which may have been the intention. Puaux, faced with an unacceptable chal-
lenge to French authority, responded by ordering his delegate in Damascus to
demand the withdrawal of the Syrian government’s memo to the courts. He
also published a communique in the Syrian press which noted that Decree 146
had been drawn up ‘in agreement with the Syrian government and taking into
account the observations presented by the religious communities, and notably
the Ulema, following the promulgation of decree 60’. 58

The communique emphasised that ‘only a decree of the High Commissioner
can annul or suspend the execution of a decree emanating from that same
authority’. Alongside this robust-sounding assertion of French authority,
however, Puaux also invited the religious communities to present ‘the new
objections they believed they should formulate’. Over the next weeks, as
Mardam Bek’s government fell, its short-lived successor came and went, and
unrest spread across Syria, Puaux set up a commission of his own to study
Syrian objections 59 - and accepted that ‘while waiting for this commission to
finish its work, the decree would not in practice be applied to the Sunni com-
munity ’. 60 He also brought his oratorial skills to a calming radio broadcast
to the Syrian people . 61 But in the meantime, angry demonstrations continued
on the streets of towns and villages across Syria: in Damascus they exceeded
the abilities of the police or gendarmes to maintain order, and French troops
were called out on 20 March. With no government able to replace the Bloc,
the French delegate in Damascus implemented direct rule. In the meantime,
the Syrian government’s commission on the question had undergone a change
in personnel: Shukri al-Ustuwani had been replaced, due to ill-health, by ‘Abd
al-Muhsin al-Ustuwani - and Kamil al-Qassab had been appointed as a fourth
member. By a majority of three to one it issued a statement comprehensively
rejecting Decrees 146 and 60 on religious grounds; Yusuf al-Hakim was left to
write a minority report arguing for them to be accepted . 62 Faced with a legal
opinion so evidently in line with popular feeling against the reform, the French
commission in its turn

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i77

observed that the objections made in the name of Islamic law bore on such a large
number of article [sic] that, to take them into account, a general rewriting of the
legislation would be necessary. Moreover, these objections could not be taken into
account as they are presented without leading to solutions irreconcilable with the
rights and interests of the other communities. 63

Puaux therefore accepted that he was cornered, and on 30 March issued a new
decree stating that Decrees 60 and 146 ‘are and remain without application
as regards the Muslims’. 64 His earlier, temporary suspension of the reforms
had only specified Sunni Muslims. The use of the vaguer term ‘Muslims’ in the
permanent suspension had important implications; so did the maintenance of
the reforms for Christians and Jews.

When Puaux notified the Quai d’Orsay of his intention to suspend the
reform decrees, his superiors asked if this measure could not be ‘put off until
later’. 65 Only after he had issued his suspension did Puaux reply that his staff
had judged it ‘impossible to defer any longer an impatiently-awaited measure.
The adjournment would have been exploited against us, and the repression of
a movement of a religious character would have been perillous.’ 66 The ministry
evidently did not realise quite how serious the situation in Syria had become,
or the extent to which - in Puaux’s opinion - the French had brought it on
themselves:

I remind you that already, in 1926, a decree on personal status could not be imple-
mented. The new experiment that has just been tried demonstrates the impossibility
for the mandatory power of legislating in matters that directly touch on a religious
legislation - which she is, besides, bound to respect by the very terms of the mandate.
The only way to assure freedom of conscience in practice would be the institution of
a civil status by the Syrian state.

In other words, Puaux was renouncing the task of reforming personal status
law in Syria. Once again, an attempt to make it a ‘mandate task’ had failed;
once again, a new High Commissioner accepted that this was a job for the
local states. At the end of the period covered by this book, that was where the
matter stood. Although they remained operative for non-Muslims, at least on
paper, the reforms had been thwarted. But as we shall see, their story - both
the attempt to enact them, and the opposition they provoked - illustrates
how the development of the nation-state form in Syria made the categories of
minority and majority increasingly meaningful.

Personal Status Law Reform and the Minorities

In Chapter 4, I showed how the establishment of fixed borders, of the sort
that define modern nation-states, has the effect of fixing certain communities

178 ]

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

into a nation-state structure where they are a minority. Since the nation-states
that replaced the Ottoman Empire, like those that replaced the other European
dynastic empires, were each dominated by one particular ‘national’ com-
munity, this effect was even felt by communities that were wholly or mostly
concentrated within one new state - communities that had previously been
one community among many others, large and small, in a polity that was not
dominated by any single ‘national’ group. The question of personal status
law reform offers more examples of the same phenomenon at work, because
the legal institutions involved were now national institutions: they stopped at
the newly defined borders, and they were increasingly defined by norms set
by the largest community - on the grounds, precisely, that it was the largest.
Here, though, the lines of definition were religious rather than ethnolinguis-
tic. Communities redefined by personal status legislation were cut off from
their members outside the new borders; they had to relate to the local state
as a community limited by the state’s own borders. Within those borders,
personal status legislation imposed a new uniformity on the relationship all
members of any given community had with the state - part of the expansion
and intensification of the state’s intervention in the lives of the population, as
the preparation and enactment of this reform demonstrate.

While nation-states may recognise the spiritual authority of an external
figure over a part of their own population, they explicitly deny the temporal
authority of such figures. This applies to the religion of both majority and
minorities: the national church must be national first, and even other churches
must establish their national credentials. This was the model that the man-
datory powers sought to apply in the post-Ottoman Levant. In Palestine, as
French officials in Syria noted, Britain asserted new ‘national’ rules for the
selection of a new Armenian Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. Previously,
this patriarch had been nominated by the Ottoman Sultan from a list drawn
up by a gathering of senior clerics from ‘all the territories . . . belonging to
the Ottoman Empire’. But during the mandate, the British authorities insisted
that the patriarch must be nominated (by King George V of England, in loco
sultani) from a list drawn up by senior Armenian Orthodox clerics from within
the borders of mandate Palestine only. Moreover, he must himself belong
to the Armenian Orthodox community of Palestine - that is, he must be a
Palestinian national. 67

A similar concern to ‘nationalise’ religious authority is evident in French
mandate Syria. Article 9 of Decree 60, which appointed each community’s
‘highest religious chief’ as its representative ‘in their relations with the public
powers’, also stipulated that in any community where the relevant spiritual
authority resided outside the French mandate territories, in this quasi-temporal
dimension of his authority he must ‘delegate his powers to a local representa-
tive’. 68 In this case, the careful wording - resident outside the French mandate
territories (hors des territoires des Etats dn Levant sous mandat frangais)

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i79

- allowed the Christians of Syria to be represented by a patriarch resident in
Lebanon. The patriarchs could thus serve as a channel for political authority
between the High Commission and Christian Syrians, bypassing the intermedi-
ary of the Syrian government: an arrangement that was to the mutual advan-
tage of the High Commission and the patriarchs, if not of ordinary Christian
Syrians. We see here the tension between French attempts to ‘nationalise’ reli-
gion in Syria (as part of the mandatory’s state-building project) and the French
concern to undermine the development of national, and especially nationalist,
politics in the country. But as the development of the Syrian state’s national
institutions gathered momentum, it proved impossible to justify the attribution
of temporal authority over Syrian communities to religious authorities resident
over the border in Lebanon. The logic of state development made it impos-
sible for the French to have their cake and eat it, as the example of the Druze
community demonstrates.

Earlier, I mentioned that the Druzes, uniquely among the ‘dissident’ or
‘heretical’ Muslim communities of the Levant, had enjoyed a degree of formal
recognition in the late Ottoman Empire that allowed them to maintain a
distinct personal status regime, notably with regard to inheritance and succes-
sion: Druze parents could leave most of their estate to one child rather than
following the strict proportions set down in both Islamic law and Syrian civil
law. One such case was that of Husayn and Asma Kanafani, of the village of
Jaramana outside Damascus, who left all their immovable property to their
son Fakhri - half directly, half in the form of an endowment to his and his
descendants’ benefit. Fakhri’s sisters received only ‘a few gold pounds’. In
1933 Fakhri had the property entered on the land register (livre fonder ) in
conformance with the will. Perhaps understandably, his sisters, ‘Atiyya and
Fawziyya, were unhappy with this arrangement. By 1935 the family was
engaged in two internecine legal actions. 69

The first was launched by Fakhri, to justify and affirm his inheritance.
It passed to the Druze qadi of Hasbaya-Rashaya (‘sitting, as we know, in
Lebanese territory’), who in successive judgements of 10 February and 6 April
1935 affirmed his own competence, ratione loci, to hear the case, and found in
Fakhri’s favour. The judgement was confirmed on appeal (17 May 1936) by
the Druze shaykhs of Baakline, the highest Druze religious authorities. In the
meantime, however, ‘Atiyya and Fawziyya had contested the will in the Syrian
civil courts - whose inheritance law would guarantee them a fixed proportion
of their parents’ entire estate. The Syrian courts duly found, and confirmed on
appeal, that the parents’ wills were invalid, and ordered ‘that the properties
[immeubles] be registered in the names of all the living children of the late
Hussein Kanafani, according to the rules of devolution ab intestat applicable
to alienable state land [terres amirie]’. The tribunal of first instance had argued
its competence on the grounds that ‘the disputed land, being in Syrian terri-
tory, could not come under a judge sitting outwith this territory’; the court of

180 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

appeal added that in Syria, Druzes were subject in personal status matters ‘not
to jurisdictions proper to the Druze community, but, like all Muslims, to the
shariah tribunals ’. 70 In the face of these conflicting judgements, by the end of
1936 the case - now ‘combined’ into one - had passed to the tribunal des con-
flits-. a body created by the High Commission in 1924 to rule in such matters . 71

The jurisdictional dispute at issue here is complex. The Syrian courts were
asserting the ‘nationalisation’ of justice: the competence of the Druze legal
authorities was initially dismissed because they were not Syrian: they lay over
the new border in Lebanon . 72 This meant that the Syrian courts were also
recognising the border as the limit of their own jurisdiction: such institutional
recognition is one of the ways in which borders become more than mere lines
on maps. By extension, though, the case also provided an opportunity for
the Syrian civil courts to challenge the existence of multiple personal status
regimes within Syria - but not, as it turned out, to the benefit of the civil courts
themselves. The court of appeal, as well as accepting the ‘national’ argument,
made its own argument against the very right of the Druzes to exist as a com-
munity separate from the Sunni Muslims. They countered the late-Ottoman
legal precedents cited by the High Commission that seemed to enshrine a sepa-
rate status for the Druzes with a more recent one, a letter from the Ottoman
shaykh al-islam from shortly before the First World War stating that Druzes,
‘Nusayris’ (‘Alawis) and Isma'ilis were to be considered as Muslims, recorded
as such on the civil register, and governed by the shariah courts . 73 The general
principles of this argument had already been put to the French by the Syrian
interior and justice ministries, probably as a result of the Kanafani case, in
1934 - at which point the Syrian government was not exactly nationalist in
complexion . 74 This suggests that legal institutions which the French had hoped
would permit them to institutionalise divisions within Syrian society buckled
under pressure from the community with the greatest weight - of numbers, of
existing influence - in Syrian society: the Sunni Muslims. The state would be
made in their image, and they did not accept the separate communal existence
of the Druzes. The opinion of the Druzes became irrelevant, and the French
were in the end forced to go along with political realities in Syria. Ironically, it
was the new borders that had given Sunni Muslims that numerical advantage:
in the mandate territories as a whole they were a rather less overwhelming
majority.

One might see this as a majority imposing its will within the nation-state
form, against the wishes of the imperial power and the minorities alike. Several
other points need to be made to nuance this argument, however. This judgement
of the Syrian courts was not imposed spontaneously from above but solicited
by members of the Druze community, ‘Atiyya and Fawziyya Kanafani: it was
in their interest for the Druzes to be governed (whether through the civil or the
shariah courts) by Islamic personal status law. The ‘pro-Druze’ argument was
made by their brother Fakhri; his cause was backed by other influential Druzes

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 181

who had an interest in Druze communal separateness. It would be wrong to
see the Druzes as a coherent minority uniformly disadvantaged in this ques-
tion. Neither they, nor by extension any other community, were monolithic
and univocal in their relations with the state and wider society in the mandate
territories: as we have already seen, when Decree 60 called for the existing
authorities within each personal status community to produce a communal
statute, at least three different Druze groups produced competing versions for
theirs. This illustrates two further points. First, Syrians who sought a degree of
cooperation with the High Commission were by no means passive tools of the
French; and, second, within each community, different groups and individuals
sought to use legislative reform in this area in order to redefine that community
to their own advantage - as we also saw in the debate about treaty guarantees.

These points hold, a fortiori, for the Sunni Muslims too: whether a coher-
ent majority mobilised around this issue, rather than a coalition of socially and
politically influential Muslim actors, is doubtful. But although this term, like
minority, should always be used with caution, the conditions were develop-
ing in which both were becoming increasingly meaningful: the jurisdictional
hardening of Syria’s borders was a part of that development. In the Kanafani
case, no-one seems to have defended the ‘Sunni’ point of view on the grounds
that Sunnis were the majority. Just a few years later, during the protests over
Decree 146, they would. In the meantime, the development of Syria’s national
legal institutions made ‘minority’ an increasingly meaningful concept.

At the end of 1935, the French delegation in Damascus sent a letter to its senior
regional officials across Syria requesting information on the ‘personal status
of sects dissident from Islam: Yazidis, ‘Alawis, Isma'ilis and Shi'ites’ 75 in their
region. The High Commission was minded to grant recognition to at least
some of these communities under the personal status law reform, and wished
to inform itself of current legal practices. 76 As a model to guide their answers,
the officials were sent a copy of an earlier letter on the subject from the assist-
ant delegate in the autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta, which discussed local
practice in a range of personal status matters.

The first was marriage. Under existing law, the letter noted - the Ottoman
Family Law, enacted as recently as 25 October 1917 - only the Sunni cadi
was legally qualified to celebrate the marriage of Muslims, Sunni or otherwise.
However, ‘it is normal practice for him in fact to delegate all his powers to
the imams of the different sects to proceed to nuptial ceremonies’. 77 Doing so
had the aim of not only ’dispensing him from a personal inconvenience’, but
also of ‘respecting the liturgical precepts of certain sects deriving from Islam’,
since not all non-Sunni Muslims accepted the cadi’s officiation as valid. The
cadi issued a marriage authorisation for the couple to the relevant imam; in
turn, ‘the latter draws up a marriage certificate which is returned to the Cadi
for registration, then transmission to the civil register’ - a neat interlocking of

1 82 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

state and local practices. In matters of succession, the cadi apparently always
acted as notary for all communities, Christians included; but ‘he writes out
the acts of devolution upon sight of documents addressed by the mukhtars in
conformance with the customs of each sect’.

Officially or unofficially, certain other privileges had been accorded to dif-
ferent communities within the sanjak. The ‘Alawis, by French decree, had a
commission overseeing their own pious endowments; they were also recorded
as ‘Alawis on the civil register. The handful of Isma'ilis in the sanjak - seventy,
resident in the village of Jandaliyya - also seem to have managed their own
waqfs, but they were listed on the civil register ‘under the generic heading
of “Muslims’”. The officer attributed to ‘a sentiment of fear’ their failure to
request a more specific designation. ‘However’, he continued, ‘in statistics and
on the electoral roll, the Sanjak authorities never fail to mention them under
the name of their sect.’

When the other French regional officials sent in their own letters following
this model, many similar examples of tacit understandings and rule-bending
emerged. In the governorate of Homs, the Sunni cadi had sole competence
over the civil register, pious endowments and succession - in principle. In
practice, though, ‘the [‘Alawi] Imams by tacit delegation from the Cadi take
responsibility for all operations, regularized thereafter by the Cadi ’. 78 Each
‘Alawi village had such an imam. In the rural caza of Salamiyya, ‘Alawis were
listed as such on the civil register; in Homs itself, the formula “Alawi Muslims’
had replaced ‘Muslims’ to designate them. The Isma'ilis, meanwhile - more
numerous here than in Alexandretta - had since 1920 also been listed specifi-
cally on the civil register; they possessed waqfs, and, again by delegation from
the cadi, their imams could officiate at weddings. In matters of succession,
‘everything is settled amicably [regie a I’amiable] before the shaykhs. In case
of litigation, the affair is brought before the Cadi who judges according to the
Mufti’s opinion.’

The assistant delegate in Aleppo forwarded reports from sub-officers in
the countryside to the north and south of the city. In the cazas of A'zaz and
the Kurd Dagh, only the Yazidis were concerned. The French intelligence
officer responsible wrote that they ‘have no specific status and follow in all
circumstances the general rule imposed on Muslims by the existing laws’ - but
added that ‘in matters of marriage and succession, the decisions taken by the
Cadi and local shariah tribunals are always ratified unofficially by the head
of the Yazidi community representing the high religious leader of the Djebel
Sindjar ’. 79 He thought, though, that this was a mere ‘formality’ whose main
purpose was to ‘swell the coffers’ of these local community heads. Perhaps
more significantly, ‘in all acts concerning the members of this sect’, the local
civil registry had started to mention Yazidis’ communal belonging, unofficial
though it was.

A greater degree of practical autonomy in personal status matters extended

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 183

to Shi'is in the caza of Idlib, south of Aleppo. A Shi'i shaykh designated by
the contracting parties officiated at marriages, by delegation from the Sunni
cadi - though the French officer there noted that ‘if this procedure is strictly
observed among the Shi'is of the villages Faoua and Keferia (Idlib caza) it is
rarely so among those of Maaret Mesrine (same caza) who tolerate the celebra-
tion of marriage by a Sunni Sheikh’. 80 Divorce, meanwhile, ‘is pronounced by
the Sunni Cadi but only takes effect, from the religious point of view, when
the Shi'i Imam has proceeded to the separation of the bodies’. The Sunni cadi
notarised succession for ‘all Muslims’, but Shi'i waqfs were overseen ‘by a Shi'i
commission officially designated by the government’. Shi'is in the caza were
also entered as such in the civil register.

Closer to the centre of gravity of ‘mainstream’ Sunni Islam in Syria, and
of Syrian Arab nationalism, however, French officials turned up less evidence
that non-Sunni Muslim communities lived with such tacit recognition on
the part of local state officials, civil and religious. Scattered among an over-
whelmingly Sunni population, the small Shi'i and ‘Alawi communities of the
Damascus and Hawran regions, each numbering around 1,650, lived with
no personal status recognition: ‘Shi'is and 'Alawis depend directly from the
[Sunni] Cadi of their caza, for questions of marriage as much as for questions
of succession. The Cadi only delegates his powers to the Imams to proceed to
the nuptial ceremonies.’ 81 Some 1,200 of the Shi'is were listed as Sunnis on the
civil register.

This difference in practices from region to region, caza to caza, village to
village, is significant. Divergent local practices existed, many of them involv-
ing greater or lesser degrees of recognition - especially unofficial recognition
- of different religious communities that lacked such recognition at the state
level. This demonstrates the relative weakness of the state’s interventions in
the social life of the population, as well as the relative freedom of action
afforded to the state’s local officials - here, the cadis - to bend the rules in
the interests of communal harmony, or even an easy life (‘dispensing with
a personal inconvenience’). But the High Commission was collecting this
information for a reason. Informed by a knowledge of current practices as
well as current legal ‘theory’, the mandatory authorities were planning a legal
reform that was intended to bring standardisation and ‘officialisation’ in both
theory and practice. By standardisation I mean that the relationship between
state and religious jurisdictions was to be legally defined by the state, with all
religious communities being recognised as either personal status communities
or common law communities. All communities within each of these catego-
ries would be accorded the same rights and privileges, uniformly across the
territory; all individuals within each community would be governed, every-
where within Syria’s borders, by one standard legal status. By ‘officialisa-
tion’, I mean that communities derived from Islam that had previously been
recognised only unofficially, and patchily across the territory, by local state

184 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

functionaries or the French, would now be officially recognised by the Syrian
state.

To an extent, both standardisation and officialisation served French aims.
The former, because it would extend to Sunni Islam on the same basis as any
other community, would circumscribe the social and political power of the
shariah courts in particular and the Sunni Muslim community in general. The
latter, by granting a state-guaranteed institutional existence to communities
once legally subsumed within (and politically and socially subordinate to) the
Sunni Muslim community, would have a similar effect, and - it was hoped -
gain France the loyalty and goodwill of these communities. However, while
the importance of these political considerations should obviously not be dis-
counted, it would be a mistake to think that they were the only motivation
for reform. If the French had little enthusiasm for building a nation in Syria,
they were nonetheless committed to the task of building a state: colonial rule
no less than national(ist) rule requires a state apparatus. Reform of the legal
system would bring about a new uniformity in the state’s relationship with
religion that was in line with modern conceptions of the state - a uniformity
given order from above, rather than a flexible modus operandi established
at the level of society by local authority figures and local state officials. The
modern French conception of the state prizes uniformity particularly highly, 82
but the diversity and number of precedents sought by the High Commission
show that this breed of reform is characteristic of modern states more
generally.

In other words, personal status law reform should not be seen merely as
an imperialist design, but also as part of the modern expansion of the state: in
this case, through its greater regulation of, and implication in, religious affairs
at both macro and micro levels. Once again, it is from this expansion and
intensification of state activity that ‘minorities’ emerge. The creation of a codi-
fied legal status, applied uniformly across the territory to govern all members
of a given community in their relationship to the state, on the one hand; on
the other, a centrally-propelled tendency towards greater uniformity of legal
practice in their relationship with the state at local and national levels, includ-
ing the creation of state-ordered, state-wide communal institutions: both of
these developments, I would argue, would act to increase the feeling within
that community of being a coherent group within the state as a whole. 83 The
scope for divergent practices and unofficial rule-bending of the sort described
above would be reduced. This process, naturally, should not be separated from
those described in earlier chapters: the increase of the state’s authority across
the whole territory, or the development of new forms of political institution-
alisation for the communities during the treaty negotiations. Other examples
could be suggested, too: for example, that of language, as certain languages
were formally made official state languages. The expansion of an education
system teaching, and a bureaucracy using, the official language puts speakers

Personal Status Law Reform

[185

of non-official languages at an increasing disadvantage relative to speakers of
the official language; at the same time it increases their sense of being a coher-
ent linguistic community. Where the state opposes or even represses the use of
non-official languages, that sense is only increased. 84

However, although it surely produced communities with a greater sense of
coherence than the Ottoman millets - with all their local variations in status
- had known, this ‘uniformisation’ within the religious communities did not
by itself produce the sense of being a minority. In the Syrian case, at least, two
further elements were required. The first of these has already been mentioned:
the application to the common law and personal status communities of the
term itself, as it spread in Syria in the 1930s with all its legal and political
implications. But the other was even more important: the existence of another
community which, while the state was imposing itself more forcefully on the
population, was able through weight of numbers - by mobilising itself as a
numerical majority within the nation-state - to impose itself as the definer of
the state ‘norms’ from which other communities were seen to diverge, even
where that divergence was legally accepted. This was not part of French plans:
the French preference was clearly for a religiously ‘neutral’ state and a civil law
(albeit both serving as tools of French imperial policy), to which all religious
communities would be equally subordinated. The religious community which,
against French wishes, imposed itself as the ‘majority’ in this controversy was
the Sunni Muslim community.

How the Reform was Blocked: the ‘Majority’ View?

High Commissioner Puaux’s description of a ‘petition’ against Decrees 60 and
146 sent in February 1939 by a group of ‘ulama’, cited above, is misleading.
The document in question was not a text signed or stamped by a number of
individuals, like countless petitions contained in the French archives, but a
letter signed by one individual - Kamil al-Qassab - in his capacity as president
of the Damascus Association of ‘Ulama’ (Figure 1). Sent to the Syrian interior
ministry on 8 February 1939, it set out the association’s objections to the
decrees and ‘the provisions they contain that contradict the book of God most
high to which all Muslims adhere’:

The Association considers it a religious duty to set out what is contrary to the pro-
visions of Islamic legislation in these two decrees, and the dissolution of the ties of
harmony and brotherhood between the Muslims and the other communities [tawa’if]
that is intended by them . 85

The association identified seven problems with Decree 60, as amended by
Decree 146. First, Article 1 ‘considered Muslims in their abode [ fi darihim] 86 to
be a religious community like the other communities in the Syrian land’:

i8 6 ]

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

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1939). Courtesy of the Elistorical Documents Centre, Damascus.

Personal Status Law Reform

[187

But this is contrary to the reality, and to the verified, official records of the census,
that the Syrian land is an Islamic land inhabited by a Muslim majority [bilad
islamiyya yaqtunuha aktbariyya muslima ], though Islam has guaranteed the preser-
vation of the rights of minorities and defended them from everything incompatible
with their religious and social freedom since its very beginning [mundku bazagh
fajribi: literally ‘since its dawn broke’] and until the [world’s] turning stops.

Second, Articles 8 and 9 granted authority to the highest religious chief of each
community to carry out various acts on the community’s behalf and to rep-
resent it to the public powers. ‘Such representation is not in accordance with
shariah provisions: Islam does not give this authority or these rights of disposal
[hadbihi al-sulta wal-tasarrufdt] to anyone, however senior.’ Third, Article 11
permitted anyone of sound mind having attained the age of reason - Muslims
included - to join or leave any recognised personal status community. ‘This
is something that the true Islamic religion has never in any way permitted: it
punishes the apostate from his religion by death in this world, and eternal fire
in the hereafter.’ All that was meant by the Syrian constitution’s guarantee of
absolute freedom of conscience, al-Qassab continued, was that all communities
were free to practise their existing religion unmolested.

Fourth, the amended Article 12 stated that in the case of a marriage ending,
for whatever reason, children would follow the father’s religion; but Islam
states that children must follow the Muslim parent. Therefore, the children
must follow the mother if she converted to Islam, whether after her husband’s
death or during the marriage. (The latter would under Islamic law imply the
annulment of the marriage - indeed, a fair proportion of conversions involved
Christian women using this means to obtain a divorce. 87 ) Fifth, the amended
Article 23 stated that if one spouse changed religion, rather than both, the mar-
riage would remain valid and subject to the personal status regime under which
it had been contracted; any children would remain legitimate. But Islam could
not permit a woman who converted to Islam to remain under the custody of
a non-Muslim husband, or allow non-Muslim children to inherit legitimately
from a Muslim parent. Sixth, the new Article 25 allowed marriages contracted
abroad by Syrians and Lebanese to be considered legitimate in Syria, under
civil law if they contravened the personal status of either contracting party: ‘it
thereby permitted the marriage of a Muslim woman to a stranger to her reli-
gion, even though the shariah does not consent to it’. Seventh, the new Article
27 established a higher jurisdiction to judge on conflicts between different per-
sonal status jurisdictions or between them and the civil courts, and to decide
the validity of judgements issued by the personal status jurisdictions:

This means the creation of a new legislation for Muslims’ personal status, changing
their laws, which they have adhered to since the dawn of Islam until now; the grant-
ing to the higher jurisdiction of competence to execute, replace, or abolish [those
laws]; and rule by other than what God most high sent down in his noble book . . .

188 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Such a thing could not be countenanced; indeed, it had already - continued the
letter - provoked the opposition of Muslims in the rest of the Islamic world.
In sum, ‘the personal status decree cannot be applied in this country’. It was
contrary to the shariah, which ‘guarantees the rights of minorities and others,
and the ensuring of their personal status’; indeed, as it stood the decree would
‘cause division between the majority and the minority’.

Because of all this, the Damascus Association of ‘Ulama’ and the Muslims as a whole
protest against this decree which is contrary to the laws of their true religion and
in violation of articles six and nine of the Mandate charter, to which the French
Republic adheres in claiming its mandate over this Syrian land.

The association rejected its promulgation and application, and demanded
that the Syrian government send it back to the High Commission - and order
the courts not to consider it as law until such time as the High Commission
abrogated it.

The religious grounds on which the decrees were rejected are clear enough,
though it is instructive to note, with Puaux, the long delay between the prom-
ulgation of Decree 146 and the onset of protests against it. To understand
this document’s wider significance to the argument of this book, however, it
is useful to compare it with another document received by the Syrian interior
ministry a couple of days after Kamil al-Qassab sent his letter. This document
really was a petition, written by hand in Homs’ Nuri mosque, signed by over
two hundred people, and presented to the governor by ‘a large delegation of
the city’s senior ‘ulama’ and the cream of its notables’ (Figure 2 ). 88

They voiced similar objections to the decrees, though with a less clear grasp
of the texts. First, that ‘Article V (in fact, Article 11 of Decree 60, as al-Qassab
correctly stated) permitted individuals to leave Islam . 89 ‘This is evidently con-
trary to the text of the venerated Qur’an. Anyone who dared to do such a
thing would be sentenced to death, as is well known and established.’ Second,
they objected to ‘amending article 2’ - that is, Article 2 of Decree 146 - but
for a slightly different reason to the Damascus association. This article stipu-
lated that in case of a marriage ending, the children should follow the father’s
religion. Al-Qassab had noted that according to Islamic law the children must
follow the Muslim parent, so if a Christian mother converted to Islam, either
after her husband’s death or during the marriage (thereby annulling it), her
children must convert too. For the Homs petitioners, the problem was that if a
Muslim apostatised from his religion (‘God forbid’), his children would follow
him into apostasy.

The petition’s third and fourth objections also related to marriage; al-
Qassab had also made them. The amended Article 23, stating that if only
one spouse changed religion the marriage remained valid and subject to the
personal status regime it had been contracted under, would mean that if a

Personal Status Law Reform

[189

Figure 2 The Homs petition to the Syrian interior ministry (forwarded by the
governor of Homs, 11 February 1939). Courtesy of the Historical Documents

Centre, Damascus.

190 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

married non-Muslim woman converted to Islam she would remain under the
authority of - indeed, married to - a non-Muslim husband. The article recog-
nising marriages contracted by Syrians and Lebanese abroad could also permit
a Muslim woman to be married to a non-Muslim man, ‘even if she returned
to her Islamic fatherland [wa-in c adat ild watanihd al-isldml ]’. But ‘the true
religion warns the Muslim woman against marrying anyone who differs from
her in her religion, obliges their immediate separation, and does not permit her
to remain with him if she returns to her country’.

Finally, the petition also claimed - without a specific citation - that the
decree would permit a non-Muslim woman whose husband had converted to
Islam, and any non-Muslim children, to inherit from him. 90 Neither decree
explicitly stipulates this; presumably it was seen as a logical result of the
amended Article 23, mentioned also by al-Qassab.

In their religious argumentation, then, the two documents are rather
similar. However, in the justifications that they invoke to support their argu-
ments, and in their form, they are very different. The relationship between
form and content is instructive, and illuminates the wider historical context
within which these documents were produced.

The first is a letter, typed on several pages of standard-sized paper
carrying the letterhead of the Damascus Association of ‘Ulama’, signed on
that organisation’s behalf by its president. It presented itself as expressing the
association’s authoritative opinion, with no reference to how that opinion was
reached - that is, to its own creation. The second is a petition, handwritten
on a single large sheet of paper in a clear, scribal hand. It, too, was a collec-
tive opinion, but not an ‘anonymous’ one expressed through the intermediary
of a bureaucratic organisation and its president: it was signed by some two
hundred individuals. Moreover, the Homs petition described its own produc-
tion: surprised by the promulgation by ‘the responsible authorities in this
country’ 91 of legislation that contravened Islamic law,

the Muslims held a meeting in the great Nuri mosque and studied the provisions of
decree 60 and its amendments relating to the fixing of the status of the religious com-
munities \al-tawd’if al-dmiyya] in the light of the provisions of the respected Islamic
shariah. They found it to be a mortal blow [darbatan qddiyatan ] to Islam and their
shariah . . .

This difference is also visible in the reference points each document took
in support of its arguments. The shariah, the Qur’an and existing precedents
in Islamic law were collectively the key reference point for both. But for the
Homs petition they were virtually the sole reference point - the only justifica-
tion external to Islamic law that they proffered was a single reference to inter-
national law, when they asserted that the decree’s content was ‘contrary to the
religion and the shariah, and contrary to what international laws including

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 191

the charter of the League of Nations have decreed’. Importantly, there is only
the vaguest reference to the state in the Homs petition - it referred only to the
‘responsible authorities in this country [al-sulta al-qa’ima fi hadhihi al-bilad ]’;
it was addressed to the minister with the request that he ‘forward it to the rel-
evant authorities [al-mardji c al-mukhtassa]’ so the decree could be abrogated.

Al-Qassab’s letter, by contrast, reached for any number of justifications
external to Islamic law. Although it argued on the basis of the truth of Islam
as a revealed religion, it argued for that religion’s unique and dominant posi-
tion in Syria on the grounds that the country was, as the ‘verified, official
records of the census [quyud al-ibsa al-rasmiyya al-muthbata]’ showed,
‘inhabited by a Muslim majority’ - a majority, moreover, which protected
‘minorities’. (The Homs petition mentioned neither a majority nor minori-
ties.) As we saw above, al-Qassab’s letter referred much more specifically to
the League of Nations Charter, which, it noted, was the justification for the
French presence in Syria. Where the Homs petition aimed to influence the
‘relevant authorities’, the association addressed the Syrian government with
specific demands regarding Syrian state activities, particularly the function-
ing of the courts. It is notable that the Homs petition did not mention the
revised Article 27, instituting a higher jurisdiction in personal status matters
- which, as I observed above, would assert the secular state’s authority over
all religious jurisdictions. The Association of ‘Ulama’, by contrast, strongly
objected to this article, for this reason. A concern with the state is thus not just
implicit but explicit in their letter. While the Homs petition contented itself
with protesting against articles of the decree that challenged the dominance
of Islamic norms in social life, the Association of ‘Ulama’ far more actively
asserted Islam’s role as the ‘defining authority’ of the state. Indeed, it justified
itself by using arguments that could make sense, and could exist, only in the
context of a nation-state.

The Homs petition, in its form and reference points, if not in its specific
subject, could have been written a century or two earlier: a petition to author-
ity from the city’s ‘ulama’ and notables, assuming the right to speak on behalf
of local society on the basis of their own personal authority. Its religious argu-
mentation assumed Islam’s position as the ‘norm-definer’ in Syria not because
Muslims formed the numerical majority, but because Islam is the true religion.
By contrast, the form and reference points of the association’s letter are unim-
aginable outside the modern context of the nation-state. The association was
self-consciously operating in that context, as one modern bureaucratic institu-
tion addressing, and seeking to influence, another: the Syrian state. It did so in
the ‘official’ form used by the state: a typed letter on headed paper, from one
bureaucratic official (the association’s president) to another (the Syrian interior
minister). Moreover, the association was addressing the Syrian state partly on
the latter’s terms. The Syrian state’s legal existence derived from the League of
Nations; the association invoked the League Charter. The Wilsonian ideal of

192 . J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

the self-determination of peoples meant that nation-states had to represent their
populations; the association - citing that most ‘state’ of instruments, the census
- claimed to speak for a majority of the Syrian population. Independent nation-
states had to offer protection to their minorities; Islam, said the Association,
had always done so. As the French had projected the new category of minority
into the past to describe their involvement in the Ottoman Empire, so too al-
Qassab projected it into the past, taking the modern category as a synonym for
dhimmi , the ‘protected’ non-Muslim communities under Muslim rule. But for
much of the Islamic past, dhimmis were not in the minority . 92

Opposition to the personal status reform decrees spread far more widely
than the ‘ulama’, of course: the French sent in the troops to put down mass
unrest on the streets, not to interrupt the meetings of the Damascus Association
of ‘Ulama’. Nonetheless, comparing these two documents is extremely useful
for showing how the developing nation-state context had created the condi-
tions for the emergence of a self-defined ‘majority’ in Syria . 93 At the same time,
it reminds us that people did not automatically see themselves as a majority
simply because the conditions for them to do so were now in place. The draft-
ers of the Homs position felt no need to refer to themselves as representing any
such thing, and al-Qassab, who did use the term, may have been unusual in
doing so. Although an active and influential figure, his intellectual profile (as
a reformist former student of Muhammad ‘Abduh, active in Arab nationalist
circles since the early 1900s) was atypical among the Damascene ‘ulama’ his
letter claimed to speak for, and his self-consciously modern terminology may
have been his alone . 94 This raises another question: is it accurate to consider
opposition to the reform decrees as a ‘majority’ mobilisation?

If there is a majority in the opposition to Decrees 60 and 146, it is surely a
Sunni Muslim one: the most strident protests came from Muslims (not only
‘ulama’) and related to the effect the legislation would have on the status of the
Muslim community. Puaux eventually defused the situation by issuing a decree
suspending the decrees’ application to ‘Muslims’, and received many messages
from Muslim groups expressing satisfaction and gratitude for this . 95

Syrian Christians certainly felt that Sunni Islam had successfully imposed
itself on the Syrian state. When the Syrian government’s commission on the
question issued its conclusion that the reform was contrary to Islamic law , 96
the Beirut newspaper al-Bashir published a heartfelt editorial under the head-
line ‘Must we despair? [Faut-il desesperer?]’. 97 Arguing, with emphatic bold
type, for a secular civil law that would ‘permit a common national life based
on the essential equality of personal rights’, the newspaper wrote that

For too long, Muslim law was arbitrarily imposed on non-Muslims; this is what
created the profound cleavage [le fosse profond ] that divided the nation, and what
constitutes the whole historic problem of minorities.

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i93

Today, the Syrian Commission, with a brutal audacity, calls this problem into
question and with a word cancels out the progress made [le cbemin parcottru] in the
last twenty years towards fraternal rapprochement: ‘The Muslims alone form the
Nation . . . The others are communities’.

(Here again we see the contemporary issue of minorities projected into the past
as a ‘historic problem’.) The implications of the commission’s stance were so
grave for non-Muslims, and Muslim non-Sunnis, that the newspaper asked ‘if
we should despair of the idea of the Syrian nation’.

As it became clear that the High Commission would accept the Syrian
commission’s conclusions, however grudgingly, the Catholic patriarchs of the
French mandate territories sent a letter to the High Commissioner that was later
also published in al-Basbir. They, too, argued strongly - and perhaps a touch
disingenuously - for a ‘neutral’, secular state with a civil law. Unsurprisingly,
they particularly emphasised the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Liberty, in the sense of freedom of conscience - notably the freedom to change
religion. Equality, for both individuals and communities: ‘Equality, which
has been included in the treaty projects and the protocols that have followed
them, to the point that the words “majority” and “minority” were systemati-
cally deleted - [words] resuscitated today to justify dictatorial and exclusivist
claims’. 98 And fraternity, to argue that opponents of the reforms were wrong
to claim that they would divide the majority from the minorities and break the
links of fraternity in Syria. Instead, true fraternity depended on the reform:

only a supraconfessional legislation, balancing and fixing the personal statuses of
the diverse religious communities of our countries can make it easier for these com-
munities to live each alongside the others and meld them, with order, in a mutual
sympathy and in national unity.

The Christian clergy, at least, argued - explicitly, and actually using the
terms - that the suspension for Muslims of Decrees 60 and 146 would leave
the Christian communities as permanently disadvantaged minorities within a
state dominated by a Muslim majority: ‘We cannot accept’, they said, ‘that in
Syria the Sunni majority should impose the legal prescriptions of the Qur’an
on the Christian minorities.’ And again, defending the (civil) higher jurisdic-
tion which al-Qassab had particularly condemned: ‘Would it be normal, in all
frankness, that in case of conflict - always possible - a majority community
should impose its law and its solution on a minority community?’

By 1939, it is clear that the Christian patriarchs did perceive the contest
to define and control the practices of a state whose encroachment on the lives
of the population was steadily increasing as a contest between a ‘majority’,
on one hand, and ‘minorities’, on the other. But the dissenting member of
the Syrian government’s commission on the question, the legal scholar and

194 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

(‘non-political’) politician Yusuf al-Hakim, perceived the matter slightly dif-
ferently. In his memoirs he reiterated the view he had stated at the time: that a
civil law presented sufficient benefits to Syria’s status as a state worthy of inde-
pendence that all religious groups should for the greater good accept the limi-
tations on their particular privileges. But he did not see the successful blocking
of the reform as a majority imposing its will on the state, and the minorities.
Indeed, he wrote of the support that his dissenting opinion had received from
‘those who love renewal and progress’ belonging to all communities." They
included ‘a great number of senior ‘ulama’ and highly-educated persons both
Muslim and Christian’. Such people had, like al-Hakim, held off from ‘coming
between the two factions competing for rule among the many political parties’.
For al-Hakim, the ‘religious demonstrations’ against the reform decrees were
a mobilisation that one of those factions (the nationalist opposition, allied
with certain ‘ulama’) had called out in order to embarrass the other (the Bloc
government). In other words, it was not the mobilisation of a coherent ‘major-
ity’, but a piece of factional politics that successfully drew out mass support
by somewhat underhand methods - as befitted parties which were ‘all alike in
believing that [“]the end justifies the means’”.

Among other reasons, this view is worth taking seriously because it does
not assume that communities acted as monolithic blocs in political affairs. A
constant concern of this book has been to avoid such reductive assumptions,
and to understand them when they are made in the sources: for example,
when French officials apply such thinking to Syrians. They certainly did this
during the personal status controversy, especially as regards Muslims, whose
opposition to the reform was usually attributed to all Muslims without excep-
tion. Gabriel Puaux went so far as to speak of the ‘totalitarian pretensions of
Sunnism ’. 100

In fact, Puaux’s depiction of the opposition was at best a persistent mis-
characterisation. As we saw above, he claimed that the Bloc summoned up
opposition from the ‘ulama’ more or less on a whim, whereas the ‘ulama’ who
opposed the reform actually opposed the Bloc for (among other things) agree-
ing to it. Puaux’s interpretation underestimates the capacity for independent
action of the ‘ulama’ and overestimates the Bloc’s ability, by this stage, to
manipulate them. Just as likely is that activist ‘ulama’ like al-Qassab chose to
use this issue - where they had a natural political advantage - to put pressure
on a discredited government that had proven unable to defend Syrian interests.

Seeing the ‘ulama’ as a tool wielded by the Bloc in order to stir up the
masses, however, had certain advantages for the High Commission. It allowed
Muslims as a whole to be presented as a passive, monolithic group beholden to
the whims of a few politicking nationalists - and as basically fanatical, easily
whipped up into a fury over religious issues. It also obscured the startling fact
that the mandatory authorities, in all their careful preparations for the reform
decrees, seem never to have asked Sunni religious leaders for their opinion.

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i95

Whereas the opinions of Christian patriarchs, and to a lesser extent Druze,
‘Alawi or Isma'ili religious leaders, were canvassed and taken seriously, the
voices of Sunni religious figures are almost absent from the High Commission
records on the subject - right up until the moment when their opposition sud-
denly scotched the reform. There is no equivalent to Cardinal Tappouni, the
Syrian-Catholic patriarch, who alone seems to have played a more important
role in French considerations (and left a deeper personal trace on the archives
relating to the reform) than all Sunni ‘ulama’. 101 Just as the High Commission,
for reasons we have already explored, treated the Christian clergy as the
political leaders of their community, the French seem to have assumed that the
Syrian government in place (whether before or after the arrival in power of
the National Bloc in 1936) spoke, by default, for the ‘Muslims’ - on religious
as well as on political matters. The magnitude of this error became apparent
as the ‘ulama’ made the running in the opposition to the reform, leaving the
Bloc government no alternative but to ostentatiously repudiate a text it had
previously, albeit secretly, accepted. Of course, the Syrian government may
itself have hoped that the ‘ulama’ would follow wherever it led, especially in
the period of nationalist rule. We have already seen that the Bloc’s stand over
personal status law reform, while seeking to channel religious opposition to
the French, also sought (however lamely) to assert the position of parliament -
an institution of the secular state - as the sole legitimate source of law in Syria.

This unwillingness to acknowledge the political dynamic between the
‘ulama’ and the Syrian government highlights another noticeable aspect of
Puaux’s characterisation of the opposition: his determination to abstract the
issue of personal status reform from any consideration of its political context.
Puaux claimed that the Bloc itself incited opposition out of some impish desire
to ‘creatje] difficulties for the mandatory power’, without explaining why
the Bloc might wish to do so. 102 In fact, by 1939 the public mood in much of
Syria was extremely hostile to the mandatory power for a number of rather
good reasons, among them the French refusal to ratify the treaty, the loss of
Alexandretta, and French officials’ readiness to undermine the government’s
authority. If members of the Bloc government shared this popular anger,
the party could not, having staked everything on (and attained power by)
signing a treaty with France, simply come out in opposition to the mandatory
power. The Bloc’s chief political rivals in this period, the nationalists loosely
grouped around ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Shahbandar, benefited mightily from not
being subject to the same constraint. But that popular anger caused by French
actions gradually made the position of the Bloc untenable, hence Mardam
Bek’s decision to use the issue of personal status reform as a way to recover
some of his lost political credit. By considering the opposition to the reform
in isolation, and by attributing it to ‘Muslims’ in general, Puaux glossed over
French responsibility for the reform’s failure. That responsibility was both
direct and indirect. Direct, in that the High Commission had seemingly made

196 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

no effort to canvass the views of an extremely influential group that had an
obvious interest in any change to legislation in this area, and duly led the
opposition to it. And indirect, in that French obstructiveness had undermined
the Bloc on so many issues that popular anger against both the imperial power
and the supine nationalist government had reached a pitch where any one issue
could have blown up into unrest.

But opposition to the reform evidently cannot be understood separately
from its context. In February and March of 1939 the Syrian interior minis-
try received reports of protests from all over the country, often relating to
the ‘ nidham al-tawa’if. But when people demonstrated their anger over the
reform, they protested also about a range of other issues. If the ‘ulama’ of
Aleppo or students of Islamic law in Homs protested about personal status
in particular, the staff and students of civil secondary schools in Homs were
more concerned about challenges to Syrian state authority in peripheral areas:
they sent telegrams demanding action over an attack on the principal of the
Tajhiz school in Latakia and the burning of the Syrian flag in the Jazira . 103
Notables and students in Dar'a on the Jordanian border wrote ‘to disapprove
of the communities law’ - Decree 60 - but also ‘to support the unity of the
country, and to demand the ratification of the 1936 treaty ’. 104 In Homs again,
a demonstration of school students began at the Tajhiz, but then proceeded
to the Orthodox and Jesuit secondary schools and also drew some participa-
tion from the general population; they made their way to the Government
House, ‘calling for the downfall of colonialism, criticizing the communities law
[; nidham al-tawa’ifl ’ . 105

Although this last document does not specifically confirm that students
from the other schools actually joined the demonstration, it is likely that
they did. Souheil Chebat, who grew up in Damascus in this period, described
joining a demonstration that had come to his (Orthodox) school from the
Damascus Tajhiz and proceeded to other communal schools; being a small
child, he was carried on the shoulders of an older boy, and went home hoarse
with shouting. In this case, too, the demonstrators’ chanting addressed more
than one issue:

Tahya al-wataniyya - Islam wa masihiyya
Iskandarun c arabiyya - tasqut al-suhyiiniyya
[Long live nationalism - Muslims and Christians
Alexandretta is Arab - down with Zionism]

(At the time, he did not know what ‘Zionism’ was.) That particular demonstra-
tion was a little earlier than the protests over the personal status controversy,
but it followed the same pattern as some of them, and illustrates both the range
of targets for nationalist protests and the diverse communal backgrounds of
the people who joined them . 106

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i97

There is no way of knowing whether in other circumstances the Bloc might
have successfully convinced, co-opted or coerced the ‘ulama’ into accepting a
reformed personal status law. But it certainly can be argued that the ‘Muslim
majority’ that mobilised against personal status reform exists clearly only if
that opposition is examined in isolation. Once we place it back in its context,
the ‘majority’ is suddenly much less distinct. On any of the other burning
issues of the day, the ‘majority’ might well have constituted itself somewhat
differently. It is almost certainly true, for example, that by 1939 a majority of
Syrians would have agreed with the sentiment ‘down with colonialism!’, and
would have had a clear idea of how that sentiment should lead to a redefinition
of the state: namely, as an independent nation-state free of French tutelage.
That numerical majority was not, however, restricted to a single culturally-
defined group. Likewise, Yusuf al-Hakim publicly supported the personal
status reform against both popular opposition and his fellow members of the
Syrian government’s commission, al-Qassab among them. But he was nonethe-
less a Syrian nationalist, albeit a non-partisan one. Apportioning the blame for
the failure of nationalist rule in his memoirs, he identified many weaknesses on
the Syrian side, but placed ultimate responsibility on France’s failure to ratify
the treaty and adoption of many policies seen as harmful to the nationalist
cause (including the ‘nidham al-tawd’if he had himself defended). 107 Al-FIakim
did not belong to the ‘majority’ invoked by al-Qassab in his letter to the Syrian
government, but he did belong to that other majority: Syrians who wanted
Syria to be independent.

Conclusion

In this affair as in others, it is more analytically useful to understand the
‘majority’ as an effective ideological fiction, used for their own political ends
by a coalition of influential actors, than as a real sociological grouping. The
different parts of this coalition sought and achieved different things: for anti-
Bloc nationalist politicians like ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Shahbandar, a transient
political aim (forcing the compromised Bloc out of government); for Muslim
‘ulama’ such as Kamil al-Qassab, a longer-term strategic goal (imposing their
political ideology as the ‘state norm’). It is not hard to see how in a different
political conjuncture this coalition could have broken down - and with it the
idea of a permanent ‘majority’.

Nonetheless, the personal status debacle proved the fiction’s power. The
French backed down over the reform, but only as it touched ‘Muslims’.
Paradoxically, by accepting the definition of the ‘majority’ given by opponents
of the reform, they reinforced the minority status of the other communi-
ties. Because the reforms applied only to non-Muslims, Christian patriarchs
certainly had the sense that Sunni Muslims had imposed themselves as the
dominant community within the state, and left Christians as subordinate

198 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

minorities: ‘we cannot accept’, they wrote, though they had to, that ‘a state
be created where minorities are fixed [etablies] in civic inferiority, where the
Christian minorities are placed in tutelage under a theocratic Muslim regime
[sous un pouvoir theocratique musulman ]’ , 108 If the latter description was an
exaggeration, the perception of being a minority fixed in civic inferiority was
real enough.

But the power of the concept of ‘majority’ went even further. Whereas
Puaux’s temporary suspension of Decree 60 applied specifically to Sunni
Muslims, the new decree permanently suspending it applied to ‘the Muslims’.
All other Muslim communities were thereby collapsed into the Sunni ‘ulama’s
definition of Islam. So, while the maintenance of Decree 60’s provisions for
Christian and Jewish communities fixed them in a legally subordinate posi-
tion, their suspension for ‘Muslims’ stripped Muslim communities other than
the Sunnis of their legal existence as a distinct community . 109 Ironically, this
measure, taken by the French in order to resolve an acute but temporary crisis,
permanently effaced the institutional distinctions within the ‘Muslim’ com-
munity that it had been French policy since the occupation to reinforce. They
were thus legally incorporated into a religiously-defined majority that many
of them had spent much of the mandate period trying to escape. If Christians
faced an institutionally subordinate recognition as minorities, among non-
Sunni Muslims such deliberate non-recognition - in the context of the develop-
ing institutions of a modern state, which would no longer accept the flexible
practices of the Ottoman period - may have been an even greater spur to the
development of minority feeling.

By the later 1930s the nation-state structure in Syria was sufficiently well
established for the concept of majority to become meaningful for Syrians
themselves; hence its being invoked by opponents of the personal status law
reform. We can see how the same structural developments had also (and prob-
ably a little earlier) made the category of minority meaningful; we can see, too,
how until those changes had taken place the two terms were not meaningful,
were not used by any actors involved, and are of questionable analytical value
for scholars. This does not mean, however, that when studying the period in
which the concepts of majority and minority had become meaningful scholars
can deploy them without caution. Rather, once those concepts have become
meaningful, we should seek to understand who used them and why, and not
simply reproduce them, or for that matter apply them to groups which did not
themselves use them. Over the question of personal status law reform, as over
the question of minority guarantees in the treaty, political actors who sought
to redefine the communities they belonged to as ‘minorities’ also sought to
restructure them politically - in their internal structure, in their relationship
to the wider society, in their relationship to the state. The same goes for those
claimed to speak for a ‘majority’, but the stakes were arguably higher: that

Personal Status Law Reform

[ i99

claim implied a redefinition of the state in its relationship with the whole
population, majority and minorities alike.

Notes

1. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, pp. 225-6. These words are also quoted by Khoury,
Syria and the French Mandate, p. 567.

2. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 577.

3. This applies more or less equally to Hourani, Syria and Lebanon; Longrigg, Syria
and Lebanon; and Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate. Shambrook, French
Imperialism in Syria, mentions personal status only with reference to the fall of the
Haffar government (p. 257).

4. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate; Shambrook, French Imperialism in
Syria.

5. This is the case with Hourani, Syria and Lebanon.

6. The subject is also absent from the recent, wide-ranging volumes on the mandates
edited by Nadine Meouchy and Peter Sluglett.

7. The general information on personal status law in this and the following para-
graphs is drawn from documents in AD-SL Boxes 591, 592 and 593. Particularly
useful are two substantial High Commission documents on the topic: a fifty-page
study produced by the High Commissioner’s delegate to the Controle Generate
des Wakfs in 1928 (AD-SL Box 591, dossier Statut personnel. Documentation.
Document entitled Reforme du statut personnel, dated February 1928), and a
fourteen-page note produced by the same department - renamed the Controle des
Wakfs et de Flmmatriculation fonciere - in 1934 (AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut
personnel. Dossier general. Note sur les questions relatives au Statut Personnel,
stamped Gennardi and dated 24/5/1934). I have included page references for these
long, page-numbered documents, which I cite frequently.

8. One jurisdictional confusion that evidently did not trouble the French was that
arising from the existence of the ‘mixed courts’ set up in the Ottoman Empire to try
cases involving foreigners (including, as time went by, Ottomans who had taken
foreign citizenship) and still in existence under the mandate. This issue, which had
proved a tremendous obstacle to Ottoman legal reform, is almost never mentioned
in the French documents I have read on personal status law reform, even though
the mixed courts were presumably also affected.

9. A French official noted that:

Christian and Israelite plaintiffs used their right [faculte] of submitting cases to
the Muslim tribunals so widely that the competence of the religious jurisdic-
tions (patriarchates and rabbinates) was soon restricted to cases relative to the
matrimonial regime; the canonical law of the community fell into desuetude,
and Muslim law - now applied to the generality of cases between non-Muslims
- was by this means introduced into custom. It is precisely these customary
dispositions that the patriarchates or confessional tribunals apply today in

200 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

settlement of cases their members may submit to them may submit to them [ au
reglement des litiges dont ils peuvent etre saisis par leurs ressortissants ].

(AD-SL Box 591, dossier Statut personnel. Documentation. Document entitled
Reforme du statut personnel, dated February 1928, quote at 3-4.) That is, in
order to reduce the ‘loss-by-attrition’ of their legal authority to the Muslim courts,
the non-Muslim communities had gradually adopted Muslim legal norms. The
extremely widespread phenomenon of Christians and Jews preferring to have cases
heard before the cadi had been irritating communal leaders ever since the Islamic
conquest.

10. AD-SL Box 591, dossier Statut personnel. Documentation. Document entitled
Reforme du statut personnel, dated February 1928, pp. 9-10.

11. Details are given below.

12. On the Protestants, see AD-SL Box 593, dossier he Statut personnel et la
Communaute Protestante, notably the letter signed by four senior members (Arab
and Armenian) of the ‘Synode protestant libano-syrien’ to HC (27/5/1936) listing
the various acts of the Ottoman government granting recognition to Protestants
as a personal status community. For the ‘Epiphanios dispute’ and its implications
see AD-SL Box 593, dossier Le Statut personnel des communautes religieuses et la
question de I’Eglise orientate orthodoxe de Mgr Epiphanios.

13. This and following: AD-SL Box 591, dossier Statut personnel. Documentation.
Document entitled Reforme du statut personnel, dated February 1928, quotes at
12-13.

14. Under existing law, in fact, such property was technically registered as belong
to the head of the community (at least for the Christian churches). This created
serious problems if the head of the community died intestate, since existing law
relied on the Ottoman sultan to appoint an acting successor, but the sultanate had
been abolished. For such a case, and the French solution to it, see details of the
death and succession of Syrian-Catholic Patriarch Ephrem II Rahmani in 1929, in
AD-SL Series B, Box 16 dossier 317: Cardinal Tappouni.

15. AD-SL Box 592, dossier A/s. du Statut Personnel (handwritten). On customs
privileges: Information N°10 (5/1/1933). On special privileges of senior Greek
Orthodox clergy, including the right to be judged ‘before special jurisdictions
composed partly of laymen and partly of ecclesiastics, meeting at the Seat of the
Patriarchate’ in civil matters and ‘by their peers the Orthodox prelates meeting
under the presidency of the Patriarch’ in criminal matters: Zacharie (Greek
Orthodox Metropolitan, Beirut) to HC (1/12/1932).

16. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general, subdossier Ee statut
personnel catholique. Lagarde to Martel, 2/11/1938. Lagarde was junior minister
at the MAE, and had until recently served as a senior official in Syria. A longer
commentary on the Apostolic Delegate’s proposals can be found in a ten-page
Note by the Controle des Wakfs et de l’immatriculation fonciere (10/10/1938) -
same box, not filed in a dossier.

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 201

17. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier General. Enclosure, Note sur le
statut personnel , with letter to French Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939).

18. Both the 1928 document Reforme du statut personnel and the 1934 Note sur les
questions relatives an Statut Personnel, cited above, use these words.

19. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Juridictions religieuses. Statut personnel. Privileges
patriarcaux, subdossier Statut personnel. Juridictions religieuses [1927-28]. Note
concernant Parrete sur les juridictions religieuses (unattributed; Paris, 12/10/1926

- stamped 16/11/1926 on first page).

20. Berkes calls it ‘the decisive moment in favour of secularism’: The Development of
Secularism, p. 467.

21. This and following quote: AD-SL Box 593, dossier Juridictions religieuses. Statut
personnel. Privileges patriarcaux, subdossier Statut personnel. Juridictions reli-
gieuses [1927-28]. Note concernant Parrete sur les juridictions religieuses (unat-
tributed; Paris, 12/10/1926 - stamped 16/11/1926 on first page).

22. This and following quote from AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general. Note sur les questions relatives au Statut Personnel, stamped Gennardi
and dated 24/5/1934, quotes at p. 7. Other factual information in this paragraph
derives from the cited documents.

23. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Juridictions religieuses. Statut personnel. Privileges
patriarcaux, subdossier Statut personnel. Juridictions religieuses [1927-28]. Note
concernant Parrete sur les juridictions religieuses (unattributed; Paris, 12/10/1926

- stamped 16/11/1926 on first page).

24. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Note sur les ques-
tions relatives au Statut Personnel, stamped Gennardi and dated 24/5/1934,
pp. 7-8.

25. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Note sur les questions
relatives au Statut Personnel, stamped Gennardi and dated 24/5/1934, p. 8.

26. These quotes and information in the rest of the paragraph from AD-SL Box 593,
dossier Juridictions religieuses. Statut personnel. Privileges patriarcaux, subdossier
Statut personnel. Juridictions religieuses [1927-28]. Note concernant Parrete sur
les juridictions religieuses (unattributed; Paris, 12/10/1926 - stamped 16/11/1926
on first page).

27. The long document on Reforme du statut personnel cited above was produced
by the High Commissioner’s delegate for the Controle General des Wakfs under
Ponsot, in February 1928. The Lebanese government took up the issue for itself in
1930 with a presidential decree-law (N°6, of 3/2/1930 - text available in AD-SL
Box 592, dossier A/s. du Statut Personnel). This, too, provoked opposition: see,
e.g., same location, Ponsot to MAE (10/3/1933), and the enclosed translation
of article from Osservatore Romano and statement to Lebanese President of
Christian patriarchs meeting at Bkerke.

28. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Note sur les questions
relatives au Statut Personnel, stamped Gennardi and dated 24/5/1934, quote at
p. 13.

202 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

29. This and following quote from AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general. Note exposant le point de vue de Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire au sujet
du reglement des questions relatives au Statut Personnel (7/6/1934).

30. One striking example is the report commissioned in September 1933 from the
Lebanese judge and legal scholar Choucri Cardahi by Paul Boncour, the French
Minister for Foreign Affairs, and entitled En marge de la protection des minorites.
La question du statut personnel; son evolution dans les pays du Proche Orient
(AD-SL Box 591, dossier Statut personnel. Documentation) . This report was later
published in L’Asie frangaise (325, Dec. 1934, pp. 317-27), which did not mention
that it had been commissioned by the MAE.

31. Also the Lebanese state, since the decree applied to the mandate territories as a
whole.

32. This and following quote from AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general. Note exposant le point de vue de Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire au sujet
du reglement des questions relatives au Statut Personnel (7/6/1934).

33. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Letter, MAE to Martel
(1/5/1935). The quotes come from the Italian legislation, a decree of 29/5/1929,
directly cited in translation over two pages of this letter (Articles 3 and 9,
respectively).

34. Some representative examples can be found in AD-SL Box 591, dossier Statut
personnel. Documentation, including subdossiers on Egypt and Iraq. The latter
contains issues of the ‘Iraq Government Gazette forwarded to Beirut by the
French Legation to Iraq, with relevant items in the list of contents on the front
page marked in blue pencil: for IGG No. 9 (28/2/1932) it is Regulations of the
Jewish Community - No. 36 of 1931 ; a less directly relevant example is IGG
No. 32 (2/8/1931), where Official Holidays Law - No. 72 of 1931 is marked.
The latter example illustrates just how wide the scope of personal status law
could be.

35. AD-SL Box 591, dossier Statut personnel. Documentation. Document entitled
Reforme du statut personnel (February 1928), p. 19.

36. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Note sur les questions
relatives au Statut Personnel, stamped Gennardi and dated 24/5/1934, pp. 9-13.

37. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel des communautes. Cas des refugies
russes. See especially note by Mazas, legislative counsellor (1/5/1936) and
letter, d’Aumale (French Consul General in Palestine) to HC’s delegate-general
(16/6/1936).

38. See below.

39. The text of the decree can be found in AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut person-
nel. Dossier general, subdossier Statut dex [sic] communautes religieuses. Textes.
Another decree of the same day (61/LR) annulled all personal status legislation
prior to Decree 60/LR once this and its related texts had come into effect.

40. This and following quote from AD-SL Box 592, dossier A/s. du Statut Personnel.
Ponsot to MAE (21/4/1933).

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 203

41. The text can be found in AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general, subdossier Statut dex [sic] communautes religieuses. Textes.

42. See annexe I of the decree, listing ‘communities enjoying de jure or de facto
recognition’.

43. Titles I and II of the decree, respectively.

44. Berkes, The Development of Secularism, p. 158; Masters, Christians and Jews, chs
3-4.

45. Within Lebanon only, the decree also gave a special matrimonial regime to
Protestants, not recognised as a personal status community (Article 22).

46. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Application du Statut Personnel des Communautes
religieuses [et la communaute musulmane - \ Changement de religion et divorce.
Copy of letter from Ata Bey Ayoubi, Syrian PM, to HC’s delegate in Damascus
(20/5/1936), included with letter from HC’s delegate to HC’s delegate-general
(22/5/1936).

47. Copies of all three can be found in AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel.
Dossiers particuliers, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam,
as enclosures with a letter from Schoeffler to Puaux (27/8/1940). One was from
the ‘traditional’ religious authorities, the shuyiikb c aql of Baakline, another from
a group calling itself the Druze Reform Club (al-Nadi al-isldhi al-darzt). A third is
unattributed.

48. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Puaux to French
Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939), enclosure Note sur le statut personnel.

49. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Le Statut personnel et la Communaute Armenienne
orthodoxe. Papken I (Catholicos coadjuteur de Cilicie), to Meyrier, acting HC
(12/5/1936), enclosure Observations sur I’Avant-Projet.

50. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Martel to MAE
(2/2/1938); Puaux to French Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939), enclosure Note sur le
statut personnel.

51. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, p. 218.

52. The text can be found in AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general, subdossier Statut dex [sic] communautes religieuses. Textes.

53. Article 6 simply tasked the High Commissioner’s secretary-general with executing
the decree.

54. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Puaux to French
Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939), enclosure Note sur le statut personnel.

55. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Information N° 69/S
(13/2/1939).

56. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Information N° 66/S
(13/2/1939); al-Hakim, Suriyya wal-intidab al-faransi, p. 287.

57. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Information N° 66/S
(13/2/1939). However, another delegation - this one including ‘ulama’ - visited
Mardam Bek the same day to demand not just the suspension but the abrogation
of the reform.

204 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

58. This and following from AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general. Puaux to French Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939), enclosure Note sur le statut
personnel.

59. Decision N° 69 of 1 1/3/1939, in AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general, subdossier Statut dex \sic\ communautes religieuses. Textes.

60. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Puaux to French
Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939), enclosure Note sur le statut personnel.

61. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Puaux to French
Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939), enclosure Note sur le statut personnel. According to
Yusuf al-Hakim, Puaux’s exalted rhetorical style led some Syrians to compare him
with an evangelical pastor: Suriyya wal-intidab al-faransl, p. 286.

62. Al-Hakim, Suriyya wal-intidab al-faransT, pp. 287-90. 1 discuss the rejection of the
reform in more detail below.

63. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Undated Proces-Verbal
for the commission’s session of 28/3[/1939].

64. Decree N°53/LR of 30/3/1939. Text available in AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut
personnel. Dossier general, subdossier Statut dex [sic] communautes religieuses.
Textes.

65. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Telegram, MAE to HC
(30/3/1939).

66. This and following quote: AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general. Telegram, Puaux to MAE (31/3/1939).

67. This information, and the quotation, are from AD-SL Box 592, dossier A/s. du
Statut Personnel (handwritten), subdossier Congres des patriarches pour I’etude
des questions de statut personnel. Letter, d’Aumale to MAE; undated, but this
copy is marked ‘Communique Beyrouth, le 11 Mars 1931’. The Armenian
Orthodox had been in dispute with the British for more than a year over this.

68. Text available in AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general, sub-
dossier Statut dex [sic] communautes religieuses. Textes.

69. This account is based on AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers par-
ticuliers, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Note pour
Monsieur le Secretaire general (30/4/1937), by the legislative counsellor, Mazas.
All quotes are from this document. Mazas gives AH dates for the deaths of Husayn
and Asma, 1330 and 1349 respectively; the CE dates are 1912 and 1930-1.

70. The French official reporting this judgement adds the qualifier that the court
affirmed this ‘if not in quite the terms employed here, at least very clearly’.

71. This tribunal had been set up by Decree 2978 of 5/12/1924, and was only compe-
tent to judge on personal status cases emanating from ecclesiastical courts other
than the shariah courts. Note the difference, then, between this and the ‘higher
jurisdiction’ envisaged by Decree 146 in 1938, whose competence did extend over
the shariah courts, hence the fierce opposition to it. Decree 146, meanwhile, made
no reference to the existing tribunal des conflits: in their attempt to reduce areas
of potential conflict and overlapping competence between jurisdictions, the French

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 205

had introduced a new one! A French official had to write to the High Commission
to ask what would be the relationship between the new body and the old: AD-SL
Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Note pour Monsieur le
Conseiller legislatif from Meyrier (? - hard to read), 16/1/1939; enclosed letter,
Fournier (Judicial counsellor of Syrian Republic, Inspector-General of Justice) to
HC’s delegate in Damascus (22/12/1938). The sheepish response was that Decree
146 ‘contented itself with envisaging the future institution’ of a higher jurisdiction:
same location, Note by Mazas, legislative counsellor (25/1/1939). This gives the
impression that nobody had even thought of this problem and no-one knew what
to do about it, so best to pretend it wasn’t there. Which, because of the opposition
to the decree - and notably to this measure - was soon the case.

72. In a later case relating to the Druzes the High Commission also accepted this prin-
ciple of territoriality: see AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers par-
ticulars, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Documents
contained in bordereau d’ envoi, HC to Inspecteur General des Wakfs (29/7/1940);
Note pour Monsieur le Chef du Cabinet Politique (7/8/1940); letter, HC to HC’s
assistant delegate for autonomous territory of Jabal Druze (9/8/1940).

73. French translations of various Ottoman legal texts cited in favour of a separate
Druze status were forwarded to the French delegation in Damascus by Fakhri
Kanafani in 1934, evidently with the backing of a number of Druze notables
and religious leaders; carbon copies of his letter (dated 10/1/1934) and the
texts were forwarded to Martel by the delegate as enclosures with a long letter
(6/2/1934) discussing the general principles and their implications for other
communities, but not the specifics of the Kanafani case. The conflicting prec-
edents are also outlined in AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers
particidiers, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. HC’s
delegate to Syrian Republic to Martel (6/3/193 6). The delegate requests instruc-
tions on the matter.

74. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers particuliers, subdossier Statut
personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Undated (1934) copy of letter, Syrian
Minister of the Interior to French counsellor for the interior, enclosed with letter,
HC’s delegate to Syrian Republic to Martel (13/7/1934).

75. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers particuliers, subdossier Statut
personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Fain to HC’s assistant delegates in
Aleppo, Homs, Dayr al-Zur and inspector of special services ( Inspecteur des S.S.)
for Damascus and Hawran sanjaks (20/12/1935) enclosing copy of letter, assistant
counsellor of HCt/HC’s assistant delegate for autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta
(10/2/1934). NB: this and all the replies on the subject cited below are archive
copies rather than originals.

76. The ‘Alawi community already had such recognition in the Alaouites, but evi-
dently not in the rest of Syria. The governor of the Alaouites was not among the
addressees.

77. This and following from AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers

206 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

particuliers, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Fain
to HC’s assistant delegates in Aleppo etc. (20/12/1935). Enclosed copy of letter,
assistant counsellor of HCt/HC’s assistant delegate for autonomous Sanjak of
Alexandretta (10/2/1934).

78. This and following from AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers par-
ticuliers, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. HC’s assist-
ant delegate for sanjaks of Homs and Hama to HC’s delegate to Syrian Republic
(21/1/1936).

79. This and following from AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers
particuliers, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Trojani,
special services officer/chief of A'zaz post to HC’s assistant delegate for vilayet of
Aleppo (26/1/1936).

80. This and following from AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers
particidiers, subdossier Statut personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Tuillier,
special services officer/chief of Idlib post to HC’s assistant delegate for vilayet of
Aleppo (10/1/1936).

81. AD-SL Box 593, dossier Statut personnel. Dossiers particuliers, subdossier Statut
personnel des sectes dissidentes de I’islam. Grail, inspector of special services
for sanjaks of Damascus and Hawran to HC’s delegate to the Syrian Republic
(16/1/1936).

82. Even in the Lrench case there have been many exceptions to the prized republican
uniformity, e.g., in Alsace and Algeria. But the importance of this uniformity is as
a norm towards which practice, at least to some extent, strives.

83. It should be noted that the synagogues of Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut were con-
sidered as three separate communities under Decree 60 (annexe I). This may reflect
the absence of a ‘church’ hierarchy among the Jewish community.

84. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ‘Linguistic hegemony and minority resistance’, Journal
of Peace Research (1992), 29(3): 313-32, discusses many of these issues.

85. These and following quotes from MWT, wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 2, ivizarat
al-dakhiliyya, 74: al-Qassab to Syrian minister of interior (8/2/1939).

86. This phrasing went down particularly badly with Syrian Christian leaders, who
pointed out that Christians and Jews were just as much ‘chez eux’ in Syria as
Muslims - though they ignored its clear reference to the division in Islamic law
between dcir al-isldm and dcir al-harb.

87. One such case was that of Wadiah bent Abdallah Louth, a Greek Catholic who
converted to Islam and thereby obtained a divorce from her husband. Documents
detailing the case from the period December 1935-May 1936 were hied under
both ‘minorities’ and ‘personal status’, so to speak: in AD-SL Box 494, dossier
Traite Franco-Syrie - Application - Question des minorites, and in AD-SL Box
593, dossier Application du Statut Personnel des Communautes religieuses [hw: et
la communaute musulmane - J Changement de religion et divorce.

88. MWT, wathd’iq al-daivla, sijill 2; ivizarat al-dakhiliyya. 16/5381: governor of
Homs to Syrian interior ministry (11/2/1939).

Personal Status Law Reform

[ 207

89. This and following quotes from petition enclosed with MWT, ivathaiq al-daivla,
sij ill 2; wizarat al-dakhiliyya. 16/5381: governor of Homs to Syrian interior min-
istry (11/2/1939).

90. This refers to children who were majors at the time of his conversion, since chil-
dren who were minors would have followed him.

91. This and following quotes from petition enclosed with MWT, ivathaiq al-daivla,
sijill 2; wizarat al-dakbiliyya. 16/5381: governor of Homs to Syrian interior min-
istry (11/2/1939).

92. Compare Gelvin’s point (in The Modern Middle East, pp. 137-8) about al-
Haqa’iq, a periodical published by Damascus ‘ulama’ just before the First World
War that called for the creation of ‘an Islamic political party to compete in the
arena of mass politics’:

That the ulama associated with al-Haqa’iq would even think of founding an
Islamic political party to guarantee the ‘progress’ of the ‘nation’ demonstrates
the extent to which the nineteenth-century cultural, social and political trans-
formation had influenced religious doctrines and institutions in the Ottoman
Empire.

93. A summarised version of my discussion of these documents appeared as a ‘Quick
study’ in International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2010), 42(1): 10-12.

94. I thank Thomas Pierret for this point.

95. Representative samples can be found in AD-ST Box 592, dossier Suspension
statut personnel.

96. Yusuf al-Hakim, a member of the commission, lists the Association of ‘Ulama’s
seven theses accurately in his memoirs (Suriyya ival-intidab al-faransi, p. 289)
and states that the majority of the commission agreed with them - unsurprisingly,
since Kamil al-Qassab now sat on it.

97. This and following from AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier
general. Cutting from al-Bashir, 24/3/[1939]. All emphases in original. NB:
al-Bashir was a bilingual publication: this editorial was in French, but Arabic
predominated.

98. This and following: AD-SL Box 592, dossier Suspension statut personnel. Letter
to HC (29/3/1939); copy of al-Bashir (4/4/1939). The letter is an unsigned copy;
an editor’s note in the issue of al-Bashir says it was presented by a conference
grouping all Catholic patriarchs and bishops of Syria and Lebanon ‘without
exception’.

99. This and following from al-Hakim, Suriyya ival-intidab al-faransi, p. 290.

100. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Puaux to MAE
(22/3/1939).

101. Tappouni, who was made a cardinal around this time, also featured especially
often in the archives relating to the treaty negotiations. His weight in French
considerations was disproportionate given the modest size of his flock relative to
several other Christian communities.

208 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

102. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Statut personnel. Dossier general. Puaux to French
Minister in Iraq (1/4/1939), enclosure Note sur le statut personnel.

103. MWT, wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 2; wizarat al-dcikhiliyya. 76: letter from governor
of Aleppo to Ministry of Interior (18/3/1939), forwarded to Prime Minister’s
office (21/3/1939); 19/5384: petition forwarded to interior ministry by governor
of Homs (14/2/1939); 27/5392: telegrams from Homs forwarded to interior min-
istry by governor of Homs (27/2/1939). The Tajlnz schools were civil secondary
schools, whose pupils would have been predominantly Muslim. Other instances
of this word will not be italicised.

104. MWT, wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 2; wizarat al-dakhiliyya. 29/5394: letter from
governor of Hawran to interior ministry (14/3/1939) covering two letters of
protest (not present).

105. MWT, watha’iq al-dawla, sijill 2; wizarat al-dcikhiliyya. 30/5395: letter from
governor of Homs to interior ministry (18/3/1939).

106. Personal communication from Souheil Chebat. This demonstration took place in
the winter of 1937 or 1938, when he was eight or nine years old.

107. Al-Hakim, Suriyya ival-intidab al-faransi, pp. 299-301.

108. AD-SL Box 592, dossier Suspension statut personnel. Letter to HC (29/3/1939);
copy of al-Bashir (4/4/1939).

109. Al-Hakim, Suriyya ival-intidab al-faransi, p. 290, note 1.

CONCLUSION

MINORITIES, MAJORITIES AND THE WRITING

OF HISTORY

The week before I submitted the doctoral thesis on which this book is based,
I met an American historian in the library where I was fretting over my foot-
notes. One day we went for lunch, and she asked me a question: what, in a
single sentence, is the argument of your thesis? Somewhere around the four-
teenth subordinate clause of my answer I had to accept that I was no longer in
the realm of a single sentence, and gave up. I should think about an answer, she
told me, since that question often came up in job interviews . 1

That night, long after midnight, I was walking home from the library down
a quiet Oxford street when I suddenly realised that I had the answer. In fact,
I could get it down to four words, short enough to fit on a t-shirt: Objective
conditions, subjective categories. Or, in the full sentence version: The nation-
state form creates the objective conditions in which people begin to consider
themselves as majorities and minorities; however, these remain subjective
categories.

This book has sought to demonstrate that ‘minorities’ emerged in Syria during
the mandate period, as a result of the development of the nation-state form.
As state authority spread across the territory, it bound the population more
closely together as a single unit under a single set of institutions within fixed
borders. For some groups within the population, this fixed them in a state
structure where they were a minority; it gave others a sense of belonging to,
and the scope for acting as, a ‘majority’ within the state. As the presence of the
state in the everyday life of the population intensified, the institutional rela-
tionship between population and state was redefined; because the state now
claimed to represent the population, whichever group could constitute itself as
the majority could claim the right to define that relationship. Others had more
limited rights (whether formally or informally defined), and were constituted

[ 209 ]

2io ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

as minorities. It was this transformation of the state that created the objective
conditions within which Syrians began to understand their society as being
made up of minorities and a majority. Precisely how they chose to define those
groups, and what political implications they drew from their definition, was an
open question: the categories themselves remained subjective.

As I have argued, this makes it unwise to understand French policy simply
in terms of minorities and majorities. The French, who so actively sought to
institutionalise divisions within Syrian society, did not initially do so on the
grounds that certain communities were minorities. However, when the state
structures that they put in place - and Syrians sought to control - made that
category meaningful, the French sought to harness it. In ways that would serve
their own ends, they tried to limit its application to certain groups, and define
its legal content. The logic of the nation-state form, however, meant that the
category escaped simple definition by the imperial power. On one level, it was
defined by a body of international law over which France had very limited
influence. On another, there was nothing to stop Syrians using or rejecting
it on their own terms. Syrians from groups the French did not want to call
minorities adopted the term to describe themselves; others whom the French
did seek to define as minorities proclaimed themselves part of the majority.

If we look at the emergence of minorities from the other direction, we also
see that they are not exceptional groups within modern nation-states: if they
are marginal, it is only in the sense that a margin defines a page. The existence
of separatist movements shows us state authority in the act of spreading; when
such movements based their claims on a cultural identity different to that of
the state, they highlighted the cultural identity that the state itself now adopted
- or at least, had attributed to it. As the definition of borders turned some
communities into minorities, it also permitted the definition of the majority.
The application to Syria of the international law on minorities marked Syria’s
status in the internationally recognised order as a nation-state becoming inde-
pendent, at least nominally; within Syria, the definition of legally-protected
‘minorities’ served to define the majority, and its relationship to the state that
now claimed to represent it. In many ways, the history of the nation-state is
the history of minorities: that is, the history of the processes that lead certain
groups to be defined as ‘minorities’.

Other, equally valid subjects suggest themselves for case studies like the
ones I have presented here: language is an obvious one, touched on tangentially
in several places throughout this book. All of the examples I have presented are
Syrian, but the phenomena I elucidate can easily be identified elsewhere. This
book has sought to offer a specific case study, while also providing an analyti-
cal framework that can be applied to other cases in order to understand the
changes that affect the architecture of community 2 under the multiple pressures
of modern state development. By doing so, it has also shown how historicising
the category of minority itself (and its twin, majority) opens new perspectives

Conclusion

[ in

on that development - perspectives that are concealed when minorities are
simply assumed to exist, as such.

If minorities are not marginal to the history of modern states, how has their
history been marginalised? First of all, one can identify a ‘majority view’:
one where the writing of history contributes, knowingly or not, to the same
process of defining a majority that has run through this book as the corollary
to the definition of minorities. Those who claim to speak for a majority - not
a claim I accept uncritically, as will be clear to the reader by now - are most
concerned with that majority’s history, understood as a nation’s history. By
writing ‘national’ history they affirm the majority’s existence in the present
and project it back into the past; in doing so, they also assimilate the history of
the state to that of the nation. Of course, this is not only true of professional
historians. Politicians, journalists, novelists, television producers, teachers and
many others, not all of them directly part of the state, all make more or less
elaborate references to a national past: this is part of the everyday maintenance
that nations require. Present-day minorities enter the picture only to the extent
that their history touches that of the majority: to return to our Syrian example,
consider the Armenian immigrant who threatens the fatherland, or indeed who
demonstrates the moral qualities (tolerance, hospitality) of a Syrian nation to
which he remains fundamentally foreign. Both can be found in the works of
the great Syrian historian Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali; but the Armenian refugee
as a Syrian is a rare bird . 3 Foreigners may adopt this majority viewpoint by
default, either because they too focus on the history of the ‘nation’ (even when
approaching it more critically as the history of a particular nationalism) or
because they unquestioningly apply categories transferred from their own
historical context.

The ‘minority viewpoint’ is the flip side of the majority viewpoint, and
constitutes a self-marginalisation. Members of these communities who want to
rehabilitate a history effaced from national histories; foreigners who, a priori,
see minorities in the society they study: they take for granted that their com-
munity has always been a minority, relative to a dominant community always
constituted as a majority. The majority and the state which is assumed to rep-
resent it enter their narrative only to the extent that their history touches that
of the minority under study. In other words, by depicting the history of the
minority they seek to define it in the present and project it back into the past:
national history writ small, as it were, in which one may detect a concern to
justify a claim to a future state. By seeing the minority history as separate from
the majority history, such accounts may reinforce rather than overcome its
marginalisation. Meanwhile, by associating domination with the majority and
subordination with the minority, even in order to make a (laudable) protest
against injustice, they may also obscure the real forms of domination that are
common to both . 4

2i2 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

In this analysis, both majority and minority histories impose present cat-
egories and preconceptions on the past in ways that pose serious obstacles to
our understanding. It would be futile, not to mention impossible, to try and
eliminate our consciousness of the present from our understanding of the past:
history is, precisely, applying a present consciousness to the past. We view
the past through the prism of the present, in the hope that this will help us
understand the present through the prism of the past. Nonetheless, it is pos-
sible to maintain a critical awareness of our own position, and the categories
and preconceptions it brings with it. I have tried to suggest one way of doing
this here, by historicising a concept that historians and others routinely use to
describe past and present societies . 5 Such a critical awareness can help us avoid
taking for granted, wrongly, that conditions obtaining in contemporary states
and societies obtained in earlier ones. At the same time, it can help us reach
a fuller understanding of how the contemporary world was formed. And it
may offer a means of defence when history is abused, as it always will be, for
divisive political ends.

Notes

1. This was Diana Davis, of UC Davis, and I would like to thank her.

2. Watenpaugh ( Being Modern in the Middle East, p. 26) borrows this phrase from
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny.

3. Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali, Khitat al-Sham, vol. 3, 3rd edn (Damascus: Maktabat
al-Nuri, 1983 [1928]), pp. 163-5, and Mndbakkirat, vol. 3 (Damascus: Matba'at
al-Taraqqi, 1949), pp. 685-6. Their refugee origin has marked the Armenians out
(not only from the ‘outside’) as a non-Syrian group - further removed from the
‘majority’ than members of many other Syrian minorities - long after most of them
became Syrian citizens comfortable speaking Arabic: Nicola Migliorino, ‘“Kulna
suriyyin ?” The Armenian community and the state in contemporary Syria’, in La
Syrie au quotidien. Cultures et pratiques du changement, special issue of Revue des
mondes musulmans et de la Mediterranee (2006), 115-16: 97-115.

4. Both may be deliberate as well as unwitting, of course.

5. Mazower, Salonica, and Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm:
Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002) suggest
another: each writes the history of a city in a way that extracts that history from the
nationalist accounts that have claimed it, while examining the effects on the city and
its people of competing nationalisms.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Sources

(i) Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Centre des archives diplomatiques (Nantes),

fonds Syrie-Liban

Reference in text as AD-SL Box 123, dossier title, subdossier title. Document (date).
Thus:

AD-SL Box 568, dossier Tcherkess, subdossier Armement des villages tcherkess de
Boueidan, Blei, Bourak. HC’s delegate to State of Syria (Veber) to HC’s delegate
to Controle General des Wakfs (23/2/1928).

Not all dossiers are properly inventoried and not all documents are in dossiers.
Sometimes, therefore, the folder information is sketchy. To save space, where a
document such as a Note or an intelligence service Information has a number, I
identify it by that number and the date only. Since not all - not many! - signatures
are legible, names are often not given.

All cited documents are from the l er versement unless stated. The rare exceptions are
from Serie B, the ‘nominative dossiers’ on individuals - these are identified in the
reference.

(ii) Service Historique de VArmee du Terre ( Vincennes ), sub-series 4 H (Levant,

1917-1946)

Reference in text as SHAT 4 H Box 123, dossier 1: title, subdossier title. Document
(date). Thus:

SHAT 4 H Box 168, dossier 1: Operations des troupes du territoire de I’Euphrate
dans la Haute-Djezireh (occupation du Bee de Canard ) 1927-1930, subdossier
Organisation des Postes du Bee de Canard et occupation de [ces postes]. Note sur
Paction politique menee dans la Region Nord de Djezireh . . . (1/12/1926)

[ *13 ]

214 J The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

The same points apply here as above, although in general the organisation of docu-
ments within the box is clearer. Notably, as a rule each dossier within a box is
numbered.

(Hi) Markaz al-wathaiq al-tarikhiyya (Damascus), state documents collection
Reference in text as MWT, wathaiq al-daivla, sijill [inventory] number; section -
subsections. Document number (description and date where necessary). Thus:
MWT wathaiq al-dawla, sijill 2; wizarat al-ddkbiliyya - al-amn al-’dm - taqdrir.
1: letter front KhayrI Rida, qa’immaqam of Kurd Dagh, to minister of interior
(25/4/1934).

In the Syrian archives, the same call number may group several related documents
(e.g., correspondence on a specific topic). In this case I have given the range of
dates and a general description where citing the whole group, the individual
date where citing a single document. Sometimes there are two overlapping
sequences of numerotation - in some cases I have given both numbers for ease
of triangulation.

(iu) Private papers of Albert Zurayq

These documents were kindly made available to me by Souheil Chebat, Damascus.

Newspapers and Periodicals

(i) In Arabic

Except where stated, Arabic titles were consulted at the Asad Library, Damascus.

al-Ayydm, Damascus.

Alif Bd\ Damascus.

al-Muqtabas, Damascus.

al-Qabas, Damascus (all references front articles reprinted in al-Rayyis 1994).

al-Yawm, Damascus. NB: al-Yawm was published during al-Ayydm’ s periods of sus-
pension in order to bypass the suspension order; issues of al-Yaium carried two
numbers, one for the title’s own sequential numerotation and one for that issue’s
place in the numerotation of al-Ayydm.

(ii) In French

Journal officiel de la Republique franfaise - Debats parlementaires - Debats de
I’Assemblee Nationale, Paris.

L’Asie franfaise, Paris. NB: L’Asie franfaise published longer articles with and without
individual bylines, and shorter uncredited ‘Chroniques’ (news articles). Unless an
author is cited in my footnotes, articles are uncredited. Credited articles are not
cited individually in the bibliography. The bulletin was usually published monthly
(every two months between July and October), but appeared irregularly during the
First World War: three issues in 1915, four in 1916, etc.

Select Bibliography

l 2I 5

Reference Works

These standard multi-volume reference works are mostly included because specific
entries from them are cited, as historical sources, in Chapter 1. Single-volume and/or
single-authored dictionaries and encyclopaedias are listed under Books and Articles.

(i) Lexicographical Dictionaries
Grand Larousse de la langue franfaise (Paris 1975).

Hachette Dictionnaire de la langue franqaise (Paris 1876).

Le Robert dictionnaire historique de la langue frangaise (Paris 1992/1998).

Le Robert dictionnaire de la langue franqaise (Paris 1985).

Oxford English Dictionary online (www.oed.com).

(ii) Encyclopaedias

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-
11) and 14th edn (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica Co., 1929).

Encyclopedia of Islam, CD-ROM edition (Leiden: Brill 1999-).

Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan 1930-5).

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan & Free Press,
1968).

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Oxford: Elsevier,

2001 ).

Books and Articles

For all articles cited in online versions, date of viewing should be taken as 31 January

2011.

Abrams, L. and D. J. Miller, ‘Who were the French colonialists? A reassessment of the
parti colonial, 1890-1914’, The Historical Journal (1976), 19(3): 685-725.

Aldrich, Robert, Greater France. A History of French Overseas Expansion (London:
Palgrave, 1996).

Altug, Seda and Benjamin Thomas White, ‘Frontieres et pouvoir d’Etat. La frontiere
turco-syrienne dans les annees 1920 et 1930’, Vingtieme siecle. Revue d’histoire
(2009), 103: 91-104.

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
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Anderson, Benedict, ‘Nationalism’, in Joel Krieger (ed.), The Oxford Companion to
Politics of the World, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Andrea, General Charles, La revolte druze et l’ insurrection de Damas 1925-1926
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Andrew, C. M. and A. K. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The French “colonial party”: its compo-
sition, aims and influence, 1885-1914’, The Historical Journal (1971), 14(1):
99-128.

2 i 6 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Andrew, C. M. and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The Groupe Colonial in the French Chamber
of Deputies, 1892-1932’, The Historical Journal (1974), 17(4): 837-66.

Antonius, George, The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938).

Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, paperback edn (London: Andre
Deutsch, 1986). NB: Edition information is unclear in this book, but it appears to
be an unrevised paperback of the 1973 edition, unchanged from the 3rd edition
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Babll, Nasuh, Sihdfa wa siyasa. Suriyya fl-qarn al-’ishrm ( Press and Politics. Syria in
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Race, Nation, Class, pp. 86-106.

Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities,
trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991).

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Barkey, Karen, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective
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Barkey, Henri J. and Graham E. Fuller, Turkey’s Kurdish Question (Lanham, MD:
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Batatu, Hanna, Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of its Lesser Rural Notability, and
their Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

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Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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1929).

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(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).

Benot, Yves, Massacres coloniaux 1944-1950: la IV e Republique et la wise au pas des
colonies frangaises, paperback edition with new afterword (Paris: La Decouverte,
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Berger, Maurits, ‘Regulating tolerance: protecting Egypt’s minorities’, in Baudoin

Select Bibliography

[ 217

Dupret (ed.), Standing Trial: Law and the Person in the Modern Middle East
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 345-71.

Berkes, Niyazi, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University
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1993).

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de la Republique, 1931-1961 (Paris: Autrement, 2004).

Blanchard, Pascal and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), Culture coloniale. La France conquise
par son empire 1871-1931 (Paris: Autrement, 2003).

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Bloxham, Donald, The Great Game of Genocide. Imperialism, Nationalism, and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Blumi, Isa, ‘Contesting the edges of the Ottoman Empire: rethinking ethnic and sectar-
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Boudon, Raymond and Francois Bourricaud, A Critical Dictionary of Sociology
(London: Routledge, 1989).

Bou-Nacklie, N. E., ‘Les Troupes Speciales: religious and ethnic recruitment, 1916M-6’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies (1993), 25(4): 645-60.

Bozarslan, Hamit, ‘Etats et modes de gestion du probleme kurde’, in Les Kurdes et les
Etats, special issue of Peuples mediterraneens (1994), 68-69: 185-214.

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(London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

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transgressing disciplines’, Orientalia Suecana (2003), LI-LII: 35-46.

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Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1, pp. 69-88.

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Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society. Vol. 1: The Central Lands and Vol.
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Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State, 2nd rev. edn (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1993).

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Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (eds), Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous
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Bulliet, Richard W., Conversion to Islatn in the Medieval Period: An Essay in
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2i8 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Bullock, Alan, Stephen Trombley and Bruce Eadie, The Harper Dictionary of Modern
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(ed.), France, Syrie et Liban, pp. 259-71.

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Elites in Medieval Iranian Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

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of Exeter Press, 1993).

Choueiri, Youssef M., Arab History and the Nation-State: A Study in Modem Arab
Historiography 1820-1980 (London: Routledge, 1989).

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Cohen, Amnon, ‘On the realities of the millet system: Jerusalem in the sixteenth
century’, in Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol.
2, pp. 7-18.

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NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Cohen, Ronald, ‘Ethnicity: problem and focus in anthropology’, Annual Review of
Anthropology (1978), 7: 379-403.

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Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine and Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de la France colo-
niale III. Le declin. 1931 a nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991).

Dalrymple, William, From the Holy Mountain. A journey in the Shadow of Byzantium
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Davie, May, ‘Les Orthodoxes entre Beyrouth et Damas: une millet chretienne dans
deux villes ottomanes’, in Choueiri (ed.), State and Society in Syria and Lebanon,
pp. 32-45.

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City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).

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nineteenth century’, in Hourani et al. (eds), The Modern Middle East, pp. 61-81
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Ottoman empire’, in Braude and Lewis (eds), Christians and fetus in the Ottoman
Empire, vol. 1, pp. 319-37.

Dawn, C. Ernest, ‘From Ottomanism to Arabism: the origin of an ideology’, in Hourani
et al. (eds), The modern Middle East, pp. 375-93 (first published 1973).

Dawn, C. Ernest, ‘The origins of Arab nationalism’, in Khalidi et al. (eds), The Origins
of Arab Nationalism, pp. 3-30.

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separating force?’, in Philipp and Schaebler (eds), The Syrian Land, pp. 221-50.

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paperback edition with new preface (London: Columbia University Press, 2005).

Dodge, Toby, ‘International obligation, domestic pressure and colonial nationalism;
the birth of the Iraqi state under the mandate system’, in Meouchy and Sluglett
(eds), The British and French Mandates, pp. 143-64.

Elias, Elias Hanna, La presse arabe (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1993).

El-Saleh, Mohammed Ali, ‘Les aspects economiques generaux de la relation manda-
taire: France, Syrie et Liban 1918-1946’, in Meouchy (ed.), France, Syrie et Liban,
pp. 197-210.

Elvin, Mark, ‘A working definition of “modernity”?’, Past and Present (1986), 113:
209-13.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, ‘Linguistic hegemony and minority resistance’, Journal of
Peace Research (1992), 29(3): 313-32.

Esman, Milton J. and Itamar Rabinovich (eds), Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in
the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Their own contribu-
tion is ‘The study of ethnic politics in the Middle East’, pp. 3-24.

220 ] The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

Findley, Carter V., ‘The acid test of Ottomanism: the acceptance of non-Muslims in the
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Firro, Kais M., ‘Ethnicizing the Shi'is in mandatory Lebanon’, Middle Eastern Studies
(2006), 42(5): 741-59.

Firro, Kais M., Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).

Firro, Kais M., ‘The Druze in and between Syria, Lebanon and Israel’, in Esman and
Rabinovich (eds), Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State, pp. 185-97.

Fournie, Pierre, ‘Le Mandat a l’epreuve des passions franchises: 1’affaire Sarrail (1925)’,
in Meouchy (ed.), France, Syrie et Liban, pp. 125-68.

Fournie, Pierre, ‘La representation des particularismes ethniques et religieux en
Syrie et au Liban’, in Pascal Blanchard, Stephane Blanchoin and Nicolas Bancel
(eds), L’autre et nous: « Scenes et types». Anthropologues et historiens devant
les representations des populations colonisees, des «ethnies», des «tribus» et des
«races» depuis les conquetes coloniales (Paris: ACHAC, 1995), pp. 137-41.

Fournie, Pierre and Jean-Louis Riccioli, La France et le Proche-Orient 1916-1946.
Une chronique photographique de la presence frangaise en Syrie et au Liban, en
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Fournie, Pierre and Francjois-Xavier Tregan, ‘Outils documentaires sur le mandat
francjais’, Meouchy and Sluglett (eds), The British and French Mandates, pp.
45-53.

Francis, E. K., ‘Minority groups - a revision of concepts’, British Journal of Sociology
(1951), 2(3): 219-29, 254.

Friedman, Jonathan, ‘The past in the future: history and the politics of identity’,
American Anthropologist, new series (1992), 94(4): 837-59.

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Creation of the Modern Middle East, paperback edition (London: Phoenix Press,
2000 ).

Fuccaro, Nelida, ‘Minorities and ethnic mobilisation: the Kurds in northern Iraq and
Syria’, in Meouchy and Sluglett (eds), The British and French Mandates, pp.
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Fuccaro, Nelida, ‘Ethnicity and the city: the Kurdish quarter of Damascus between
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prolongements modernes au Nepal et au Pakistan’, in La Tolerance. Colloque
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Gawrych, George W., ‘Tolerant dimensions of cultural pluralism in the Ottoman
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Gelvin, James L., The modern Middle East. A history (Oxford: Oxford University
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Gelvin, James L., ‘Modernity and its discontents: on the durability of nationalism in the
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Gelvin, James L., Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close
of Empire (London: University of California Press, 1998).

Gelvin, James L., ‘The other Arab nationalism: Syrian/Arab populism in its his-
torical and international contexts’, in Jankowski and Gershoni (eds), Rethinking
Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, pp. 231-48.

Gelvin, James L., review of Khalidi et al. (eds), The Origins of Arab Nationalism, in
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (1993), 20(1): 100-2.

Gershoni, Israel, ‘Rethinking the formation of Arab nationalism in the Middle East,
1920-1945: old and new narratives’, in Jankowski and Gershoni (eds), Rethinking
Arab Nationalism, pp. 3-25.

Girardet, Raoul, L’ldee coloniale en France de 1871 a 1962, paperback edition with
new preface and addenda (Paris: Table Ronde, [1979?]).

Gleason, Philip, ‘Minorities (almost) all: the minority concept in American social
thought’, American Quarterly (1991), 43(3): 392-424.

Gogek, Fatma Miige, ‘Ethnic segmentation, western education, and political outcomes:
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Gunter, Michael M., Historical Dictionary of the Kurds (Oxford: Scarecrow Press,
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Halliday, Fred, ‘The formation of Yemeni nationalism: initial reflections’, in Jankowski
and Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Arab Nationalism, pp. 26-41.

al-Hakim, Yusuf, Suriyya wal-intiddb al-faransT: dhikriyat IV (Syria and the French
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the first.

Hanioglu, M. §iikrii, ‘The Young Turks and the Arabs before the revolution of 1908’,
in Khalidi et al. (eds), The Origins of Arab Nationalism, pp. 31-49.

Hanna, ‘Abdallah, ‘Pour ou contre le mandat frangais. Reflexions fondees sur des
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Hanna, ‘Abdallah, ' Abd al-Rahmdn al-Shahbandar (1879-1940). ‘ ilm nahdawi wa
rajul al-wataniyya wal-taharrur al-fikri ( c Abd al-Rahman al-Shahbandar (1879-
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Hanna, ‘Abdallah, al-baraka al-’ummdliyya fi suriyya wa lubndn, 1900-1945 (The
Labour Movement in Syria and Lebanon, 1900-1945) (Damascus: Dar Dimashq,
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Hassoun, Amer Bader (‘Amir Badr Hassun), The Book of Syria. Photos from the Syrian
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Haut Commissariat de la Republique frangaise a Beyrouth, La Syrie et le Liban en 1922
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Hirschman, Charles, ‘The meaning and measurement of ethnicity in Malaysia: an
analysis of census classifications’, The Journal of Asian Studies (1987), 46(3):
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Hirschman, Charles, ‘The making of race in colonial Malaya: political economy and
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Hirschon, Renee (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory
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Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1987).

Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World
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Honvault, Juliette, ‘La cooperation nationaliste avec le pouvoir mandataire: ambiguites
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Hourani, Albert H., A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Laber & Laber, 1991).

Hourani, Albert H., Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, reissued with new
preface (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Hourani, Albert H., Minorities in the Arab World (London: Oxford University Press,
1947).

Hourani, Albert H., Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1946).

Hourani, Albert H., Philip S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson (eds), The Modern Middle
East: A Reader (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993).

Hurewitz, J. C., Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East. A Documentary Record. Vol.
1: 1535-1914 (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956).

Husry, Khaldun S., ‘The Assyrian Affair of 1933’, International Journal of Middle East
Studies (1974), 5(2): 161-76, and (1974), 5(3): 344-60.

al-Idilbl, Ulfat, Dimashq ya basmat al-huzn { Damascus , Oh Smile of Sorroiv)
(Damascus: Dar Tlass, 1989).

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INDEX

Abdiilhamid II (Ottoman sultan), 29
Alaouites (autonomous statelet), 11, 12,
16n32, 79, 82, 88, 148, 154, 162
‘Alawis, 45, 61, 70, 142, 145, 148
in armed forces, 45, 54-5
and personal status law, 182
petitioning French authorities, 87-8
separatist movement, 72-3
unofficial recognition in Ottoman
Empire, 164

Aleppo, 4, 78, 97n32, 150
state of, 1 1

Alexandretta, Sanjak of, 12, 57, 70, 79,
154, 155n6, 162
Turkish identity in, 149
Alif Bci’ (newspaper), 72

on population, territory and state,
75-82
Anatolia

contest of nationalisms in, 136
Anderson, Benedict, 34, 37, 84
Anglo-Iraqi treaty, 56, 135, 141
Arabism, 71; see also nationalism, Arab
archives, French, 5, 107
gaps in, 5, 7, 15nl4, 55-6
insistence on Syrian disunity, 6
Kurds in, 1 12
archives, Syrian, 7, 92

Arendt, Hannah, 41n57
Armenians, 48, 79, 142, 211
in armed forces, 113
cooperation with Kurds, 114
Dashnak party, 114
al-Asad, Hafiz, 83

L’Asie franqaise (bulletin of the Comite
de l’Asie frangaise), 10, 135
campaign regarding Franco-Syrian
treaty, 140-1

insistence on Syrian disunity, 137, 138
language of ‘minorities’ in, 134-43
association (as principle of colonial rule),
45, 50, 112-13, 116
Assyrians, 76, 110, 140-1, 147
Atatiirk, Kemal, 29, 74
Austro-Hungarian Empire
national identity in, 32
autonomist movements, 84, 87-91
and identitarian feeling, 87, 90
al-Ayyam (newspaper)

on population, territory and state,
75-82

Babil, Nasuh (journalist), 79-81, 84, 93
Bakdash, Khalid, 119
Balkans, 32, 35, 132
Barmada, Mustafa, 176

[ 2-33 ]

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

2-34 J

Bedouin, 89, 102

Controle Bedouin, 12
Berkes, Niyazi, 28, 58
Bloc, National see National Bloc
Boehm, Max Hildebert, 38n5, 38n8
borders, 102, 180

as defining minorities, 118, 177, 210
formation of, 35, 41n55, 77, 83, 107;

see also Syria, territorial definition of
see also Syrian-Turkish border
Bou-Nacklie, Nacklie, 45
Briand, Aristide, 134
British mandate
Iraq under, 140-1
as reference point in Syrian politics,
135, 178

British-Iraqi treaty see Anglo-Iraqi treaty
Burke, Edmund, 45

Cagaptay, Soner, 107
Catholics, 166

concerns about representation, 151
Syrian-Catholics, 148
Christians, 35, 51, 55, 55-6, 145, 192-3
as clients of France, 51, 53, 58, 76,

195

elimination from Anatolia, 106
in Jazira, 76, 86

migrants from Turkey, 76-7, 142
preferred interlocutors of French, 195
seeking legal protection as minorities,
143-6, 192-3

and separatist movements, 73
as subordinate minorities, 197-8
see also Patriarchs

Circassians, 52, 53, 89-90, 131, 139,
146-8, 149

in armed forces, 52, 54
petitioning French authorities, 145,

151

citizenship, 33 — 4, 36, 150
colonialism, 137
French, 15nl3
protests against, 196

Comite de l’Asie franqaise see L’Asie
franpaise

‘common law communities’, 165; see
also personal status law
reform

communications

in nation-state-building, 35
‘compact minorities’, 54-5, 61; see
also Druzes and ‘Alawis
Congress of Berlin (1878), 132
Controle Bedouin, 12
courts see legal system

Damascus, 72, 74, 87, 144, 156n24, 166,
176, 196

Kurdish quarter, 115-17
state of, 1 1

Damascus Association of ‘Ulama’, 175,
185, 188, 190, 192
Darbisiyya incident, 113
de Beauplan, Robert, 43, 46
de Caix, Robert, 46, 135
de Gaulle, Charles, 104
de Jouvenel, Henry, 10, 168
de Martel, Damien, 10, 56, 59, 139, 143,
169

Decree 60, 171
Dentz, Henri, 5
Deringil, Selim, 28
Dersim, 107, 114
Druzes, 54-5, 61, 70, 142, 145
‘Druze’ revolt, 89

exceptional status in Ottoman Empire,
164-5, 179, 180
Febanese, 173

education, 90, 149
Circassian medium, 146, 149
in formation of nation-state identity,

33

in mandate charter, 133
Emin Agha, 108, 110-11
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 22,
30, 38n4

Index

[ 2-35

ESS see Encyclopaedia of the Social
Sciences

Euphrates (district), 70, 92

Faysal I (King of Iraq), 50
France

mission civilisatrice, 137
as ‘protector of minorities’, 56, 59,
133, 140

Third Republic, 1 1
Vichy Regime in, 5, 10
Franco-Syrian treaty, 56, 133-4, 135,
142, 144-8, 169
and L’Asie franfaise, 141
destruction of records regarding, 7
drafting of text, 139
negotiations over, 142
nonratification of, 197
policy towards minorities in, 148-51
Franklin-Bouillon Agreement (Ankara
Agreement), 103, 105
French mandate, 43-4
legal basis, 49

policy of divide and rule, 44, 45-7, 53,
60, 118

Syrian state as instrument of, 86,

184

undermining Syrian government
authority, 82, 196
see also association (as principle of
colonial rule)

Froidevaux, Henri, 135, 137

Gelvin, James, 50, 71
Ghanime, Latif, 131, 144, 146, 148
Ghazi I (King of Iraq), 92
Giannini, Monsignor, 144
Gouraud, General Henri, 10, 134
Greece

population exchange with Turkey,
23-4, 27

Greek Orthodox, 58
Greeks, 156n20
as minority in Turkey, 27

Hajo Agha, 104, 108, 110, 115
al-Hakim, Yusuf, 55, 74, 175, 194,

197

al-Hammam (village), 105
Hanna, ‘Abdallah, 82
Haute-Djezireh see Jazira
Hayy al-Akrad see Damascus, Kurdish
quarter

High Commission (French), 107, 116,
163, 165, 167-9, 179, 194
as ‘the authority’ (al-Sulta), 81, 87,
98n46

survey of practice regarding personal
status law, 182-5
Hourani, Albert, 45

identitarian movements, 87, 90, 91, 210
al-Idilbi, Ulfat, 54

IESS see International Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences
International Court of Justice, 132
International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, 25, 26

Iraq, 71, 76, 92, 110, 111, 138, 147
admitted to Teague of Nations, 138
British mandate in, 56, 103, 113, 135,
140-1

protection of minorities in, 141
US invasion (2003), 103
Islam

as defender of minorities, 187, 188,
192

Ottoman Empire not recognising
division in, 164

as source of legitimation in Ottoman
Empire, 32
Isma'ilis, 51, 89, 145
and personal status law, 182
unofficial recognition in Ottoman
Empire, 164
al-'Issa, Yusuf, 52, 59

Jabal Druze, 11, 12, 73, 79, 148, 154,
162

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

236 ]

Jazira, 12, 76-82, 101, 117, 119, 142,
154, 162

subordination to National Bloc
government, 86

Jesuits, 88

Jews, 39nl4, 145

lay hostility towards religious courts
among, 164
in Salonica, 35, 48

Khoury, Philip, 45

Khoybun (‘Independence’) committee,

114

Kurd ‘Ali, Muhammad, 211

Kurds, 53, 58, 70, 145
autonomous Kurdish zone, 112
cooperation with Armenians, 114
cultural and political activity in Syria,
115, 116-17

employed in border posts, 113
French surveillance of, 114-15, 116
incorporation in Turkish Republic,

107

in Iraq, 140
in Jazira, 76, 86
in Kurd Dagh, 120
‘Kurdish question’, 112
‘minoritisation’ of, 112-17
taking refuge in Syria, 107-11, 113,
118

Latakia, 11

Lausanne, Treaty of, 104

League of National Action, 119

League of Nations, 24, 37, 44, 56, 57,

91, 132, 136

Article 22 of Covenant, 49
Permanent Mandates Commission,

137

League of Nations Mandate for Syria and
Lebanon, 133
Article 6, 50, 133
Article 22, 139

Lebanon, 4, 11, 51, 79, 87, 179

legal system in Syria

jurisdiction of state courts, 149,
179-80

Kanafani case, 179-81
Ottoman, 150
see also shariah law
Longrigg, Stephen, 45
Lyautey, Marshal Hubert, 50

majority

not basis of state legitimation, 31,

34

and formation of nation-state, 37
as rhetorical device, 25, 191, 197
term used in political discourse, 3
Makdisi, Ussama, 4, 33
al-Malazi, Souheil, 8
mandate charter see League of Nations
Mandate for Syria and Lebanon
Mardam Bek, Jamil, 174, 175
resignation, 162, 195
Mar din, 76
Maronites, 70

millet system, 13, 17n36, 33, 45, 47-9,
173

contrasted with minority, 59
French understanding of, 47-9, 50-1
not including Muslims, 54
persistence of millet identities, 56-60
minority

in L’Asie franqaise, 136, 138
in colonies, 132

constituted through definition of
border, 118, 177-8
contrasted with millet, 59
emergence in public discourse, 21-5,
27, 28, 30, 31, 37, 44, 60, 131, 134,
198

exceptionalism, 4
fixation of boundaries of, 148
in Franco-Syrian treaty, 142, 144-8,
169

integral to nation-state, 4, 27, 30-1,
90, 94, 118, 184

Index

[ 2-37

in international law, 23-5, 49, 52-3,
132-4, 135, 142-3, 150, 210
‘need not be a numerical minority’, 26
in post-war Europe, 22, 23, 132
and separatism, 69, 94
Supreme Allied Council and adoption
of term, 132

usage of term in French archives, 2,
46-7

usage of term by Syrians, 143-52
Muslims

and French citizenship, 36
‘majority’ against personal status law
reform, 197

National Bloc, 86, 91, 92, 101, 116, 119,
147, 151

blocking 1933 Franco-Syrian treaty,
139

fall of Bloc government, 162
opposing personal status law reform,
175-6, 194, 195
nationalism, 70-1
Arab, 71, 95n4
in Anatolia, 136

‘mystical’ territorial claims of, 74, 78,
84

reaction to separatism, 73-4
Syrian Arab, 8-9, 13, 53, 57, 119
among Syrian Christians, 59
and Syrian newspapers, 8-9, 71, 74,
75-82, 83-4
nation-state

abstracted from history, 83
authority of, 34-6
development of creates minority
identities, 90, 184, 209
and identity, 30-1, 71, 90, 192, 211
imposed on Syria, 72
modern notion of, 2
requiring ‘continuous maintenance’, 84
and separatist movements, 70-1
‘sons of the country’, 77
Nazism, 38n5

nizam (social order), 39n31

Nouri, Monsignor Ignace, 56, 131, 143

Nusaybin, 105

Ottoman Empire, 2, 27, 31, 37, 44, 45,
82, 83, 87
breakup of, 106
diversity in, 48
legal system in, 150, 163
legitimation not based on majority
rule, 31

Muslim majority in, 32-3
not recognising divisions in Islam, 164,
179

Ottomanism, 32-3
and separatism, 32
suppression of ‘allogenous
populations’, 136

Palestine, 178

parti colonial (colonial lobby in France),
135

Patriarchs, 6, 146, 152, 179, 193
personal status law, 163-6; see also
personal status law reform
personal status law reform

challenge to French authority over,

176

Decree 60/FR (13 March 1936),

171-3, 178, 181, 188, 198
Decree 146/FR (18 November 1938),
174-5, 188

demonstrations against, 176, 196
early attempts at reform, 168-9
language of ‘minorities’ in, 169
marriage, 174-5, 181, 182-3, 187,
188-90

not applied to Muslims, 177, 198
opposition by Sunnis, 192
in other countries, 170-1, 178
reform as extension of state authority,
178, 184

reforms abandoned, 177, 192
secularising intent, 170

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East

238 ]

personal status law reform (cont.)
standardisation of practice, 183-4
survey of local practices, 181-4
‘ulama’ not consulted about reforms,
194-5

petitions, 87-8, 89, 91, 117
against personal status law reform,
146-8, 175, 185-92
Poidebard, Father Antoine, 111
Ponsot, Henri, 10, 108, 139, 169
Provence, Michael, 46
Puaux, Gabriel, 10, 85, 166, 175, 185,
194-6, 198

Qamishli, 76, 78, 85, 104, 105
flag incident in, 101
al-Qassab, Kamil, 185

Rabbath, Edmond, 143, 148-52
al-Rayyis, Najib, 9, 57, 74
Reform Edict (1856 Ottoman), 58; see
also tanzimat

representative government, 28-9, 30-3

Sabri, ‘Uthman, 115
Sarrail, General Maurice, 10, 109, 168
Seale, Patrick, 45, 82
separatism, 69-100, 210
in the Alaouites, 72-3
among linguistic and religious
mainstream, 91, 92
not automatically associated with
minorities, 94
and Christians, 73
‘precise opposite of’, 91
and Sunnis, 69-70

Service des Renseignements (SR), 108
shariah law, 163, 164
abolished in Turkey, 167
challenged by personal status law
reform, 184

common law based on, 165
Shaykh Sa'id rebellion, 107, 108, 110,
113

Shi'is, 57

in Lebanon demanding Syrian unity,

91

and personal status law, 183
Sluglett, Peter, 72
South Africa

black ‘minority’ in, 26
SR see Service des Renseignements
state

access to state jobs, 149
‘a state happened’ (sdr ft dawla), 82
jurisdiction of legal system, 149-50
maintenance of as superseding
ideology, 93

religious legitimation of, 29, 31-3, 49
state versus religious authority, 170,
178

symbols of authority of, 80-1
symbols of as focus for discontent,
85-6

state, non-national, 23; see also
nation-state
Sunnis, 57, 181

accused of ‘totalitarian pretensions’,
194

ethnolinguistic division among, 51
nationalism considered purely an affair
of, 88

not considered a personal status
community, 165

not consulted about personal status
law reform, 1 94-5
as numerical majority in Syria, 1, 3,
180, 197

opposition to personal status law
reform, 192

separatism among, 69-70
subordinating Christians, 197
Sykes-Picot agreement, 50
Syria

administrative subdivision of, 13
bilcid al-Shdm (‘natural Syria’), 83,

86

as defined in Mandate Charter, 11

Index

[ 2-39

territorial definition of, 2-3, 12, 71-1,
87, 92; see also Syrian-Turkish
border

Syrian-Catholics, 148
Syrian-Turkish border, 101, 103-5,
105-11, 112-17, 118
build-up of state authority on, 104-5,
106, 113

exclusion zone, 109-11, 115

Tahan, Patriarch Alexandros III, 58
tajzi’a see tamzTq

tamziq (‘dismemberment’ of Syrian
territory), 11, 72
tanzimat, 29, 33-4, 36
Tappouni, Monsignor Ignace Gabriel I,
59, 146, 195

prominence in French archives, 195,
207nl01

Tcherkess see Circassians
Tilly, Charles, 30, 90
Transjordan, 135
Turkish Republic, 44, 106

abolition of shariah courts, 167

formation of, 23, 32, 106
incorporation of Kurds, 107
population exchange with Greece, 23,
27

‘ulama’

not consulted about personal status
law reform, 194-5
relationship with National Bloc,
194-5

see also Damascus Association of
‘Ulama’

Watenpaugh, Keith, 4

Weber, Eugen, 36

Weygand, General Maxime, 10, 168

Yazidis, 141

and personal status law, 182
unofficial recognition in Ottoman
Empire, 164

Young Turks, 136

Zisser, Eyal, 45